Forum Overview :: Balance of Power :: Bernie's platform

[quote name="blackwater"]More than any other candidate, certainly more than any other Democrat, Bernie sees businesses and the wealthy as the bad guys and wants to tax and regulate them more. You might say that this makes him "actually a Democrat," but objectively, this puts him on the hard left of his party. He is probably more simliar to a left-wing European leader than to any American politician. Europe has traditionally had leaders that self-described as Socialists, wanted to institute things like the 35-hour work week, mandatory unionization, restrictive labor laws, and so forth. The thing is, these policies have been tried before, and they failed. High tax rates create high rates of tax evasion. People move wealth out of the country or into legal shell companies. Things that might seem labor-friendly like high minimum wages or reduced working hours shift production abroad or to part-time workers. That's why the US auto industry was in trouble in the 1970s. It's why electronics manufacturing is pretty much Asia-only at this point. The problem with all this is that socialism is just as unequal in practice as capitalism. The only difference is that capitalism promotes the talented, and socialism promotes the politically well-connected. You can ask the people in Venezuela who can't get bread from the store shelves (because the political class have stolen all the country's resources) how well 21st-century socialism has worked out. But people like to keep trying the same failed ideas, unfortunately. The saddest part of all these debates is that the US tax rate is actually pretty comparable to Europe and the rest of the developed world. Our 40% corporate income tax rate doesn't compare well with Ireland's 10%. The US is not some low-tax paradise in need of socializing up. We raise a huge amount of taxes and we spend a huge amount of taxes, on an enormous military budget and a very large healthcare and pension system. The budget of all the other departments in the government is essentially a rounding error at this point. But nobody wants to talk about improving any of that, rich people are bad, mmmkay?[/quote]