Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – the self-proclaimed Democratic socialist whose standing in the 2020 primary has become threatened by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s surge in the Democratic primary with progressive voters – is seeking to cut into the support of his rival by calling her a “capitalist,” Fox News informed.
“There are differences between Elizabeth and myself,” Sanders said during an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “Elizabeth I think, as you know, has said that she is a capitalist through her bones. I’m not.”
The remarks come amid a rise in socialism in the Democratic Party, as pretenders become more willing to openly embrace socialism over capitalism.
Warren last year reportedly said “I am a capitalist to my bones” when asked if she was a capitalist.
“I will not tolerate for one second the kind of greed and corruption and income and wealth inequality and so much suffering that is going on in this country today, which is unnecessary,” Sanders also said in the interview.
A Gallup pole this year found that 43 percent of Americans think socialism would be a good thing for the U.S., while 51 percent say it would be a bad thing. Gallup emphasized that in 1942, a Roper/Fortune survey that found 40 percent of U.S. citizens described socialism as a bad thing while only 25 percent called it a good thing.
The polling is fresh proof that attitudes toward socialism are changing, amid the popularity in the Democratic Party of socialists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez who pushes policies such as “Medicare-for-all” and the Green New Deal.
Two economists at the University of California, Berkeley, claim that billionaires could face a 97.5 percent average effective tax rate under Sanders’ plan, which would easily thump other Democrats running for president in 2020.
“With the wealth tax, you get directly at the stock instead of hitting the flow of income, making it a much more powerful de-concentration tool than income taxes,” Emmanuel Saez, one of the professors, told Bloomberg.
The plan that Sanders revealed seeks a 1 percent levy on households worth more than $32 million and proposes tax rates would increase for wealthier people, up to 8 percent for fortunes more than $10 billion.
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