In an impassioned Senate floor speech last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said that there is a war being waged on America’s “disappearing and shrinking middle class.”
“We talk about a lot of things on the floor of the Senate, but somehow we forget to talk about the reality of who is winning in this economy, and who is losing,” he said. “And it is very clear to anyone who spends two minutes studying the issue that the people on top are doing extraordinarily well, at the same time as the middle class is collapsing and poverty is increasing.”
Sanders said that the wealthiest Americans today earn about 12 cents of every dollar in the economy, adding that the top 1 percent of income earners make 23.5 percent of all income. According to Sanders, that is creating a severe unequal distribution of wealth in America.
“We got to own up to it,” Sanders concluded. “There is a war going on. The middle class is struggling for existence, and they are taking on some of the wealthiest, most powerful forces in the world, whose greed has no end. And if we don’t begin to stand together and start representing those families, there will not be a middle class in this country.”
Sanders also addressed the issue of extending the Bush-era tax cuts, claiming that his Republican colleagues are more concerned with giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans than cutting the deficit.
“I think that that is absurd,” he said.
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David Taintor
David Taintor is the Front Page Editor at TPM, where he contributes to TPM's Livewire coverage, among other areas. David is from Chanhassen, Minnesota, where, yes, it gets very cold. Reach him at taintor [at] talkingpointsmemo.com
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