Posted by Rebecca Shabad at The Hill
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is planning to offer an amendment to the GOP budget next week that would impose a new tax on millionaires to finance U.S. military operations.
The “war tax” will be one of the first Sanders will introduce during the vote-a-rama next week. During the back-to-back votes, senators are allowed to submit an unlimited amount of amendments.
“The Republicans took us into protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and ran up our national debt by trillions because they chose not to pay for those wars. Instead, they put the cost of those wars on our national credit card,” Sanders said in a statement Friday.
Sanders, a potential 2016 presidential contender, is ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee.
He’s upset with a provision Senate Republicans added to their blueprint Thursday that would increase defense spending next year by pumping up the Pentagon’s war funding account to $96 billion.
Full Story @ The Hill http://thehill.com/policy/finance/236463-sanders-to-push-war-tax-for-millionaires-to-finance-piece-of-gop-budget
Sanders doesn’t even oppose the current Iraq/Syria war, now that a Democrat is waging it instead of a Republican. Sure, he says (just like Obama and Rand Paul) that he doesn’t want “boots on the ground”. He just wants airstrikes and special forces (who I guess don’t wear boots) and for the US to wage war-by-proxy using the US-funded Saudi, Iraqi, Kurdish, etc. armies.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/02/11/bernie_sanders_this_war_is_a_battle_for_the_soul_of_islam_and_it_should_be_muslim_countries_sending_troops.html
Langa is right, Sanders doesn’t care about war, imperialism, or the military-industrial complex, and he certainly doesn’t even pretend to advocate a non-interventionist foreign policy. (latest genius idea: the Fed should bail out Greece because Bernie feels their new socialist ruling party is awesome and it’s so unfair the EU won’t give them an infinite bailout with no strings attached).
He’s an unreconstructed old-school socialist (in the UK what they’d call ‘Old Labour’): he’s all about bashing the free market, attack the rich, corporations are evil incarnate, increasing gov’t spending is its own good, every market always needs more restrictive regulations, and of course his number one dead horse that he likes to beat: ‘eat the rich’ confiscatory tax rates that he knows full well will never be passed.
The United States could be completely at peace, and he’d just find some other cause to attach his tax increase too (education, poverty, healthcare, take your pick. There’s always some problem the Sanders of the world think they could solve with more of other people’s money). The fact that he wants to hike taxes to pay for the war, rather than end the war and thus the alleged need for higher taxes, speaks for itself.
Face it, structural inequality and imperialism are intertwined.
I agree, but I would take it one step further and point out that structural inequality and the existence of the state are inseparably intertwined, and until people face up to that unpleasant reality, they are just spinning their wheels. The idea that increasing government power can be used as a means of combating plutocracy strikes me as naive in the extreme.
Of sitting Senators his voting record on war/imperialism is probably better than other Senators (including Rand, probably). Faint praise, considering the company he keeps.
Any nation that fails to regulate their military-industrial-complex and subject it to democratic accountability is going to be hard-pressed to preserve liberty. But such accountability might get in the way of profits for corporate executives in these industries, whose lobbyists possess all congressmen in their pocket.
Face it, structural inequality and imperialism are intertwined. The sooner people face up to that unpleasant reality, the sooner we can get to work fixing the problem.
It’s unacceptable that people make millions of dollars a year from war profiterring. And doubly unacceptable that it comes out of our tax money. Prosecute the criminals, please.
…why not make those that profit from the wars pay for them?
Better yet, why doesn’t Sanders oppose the wars themselves, rather than using them as a pretext for his pet project of taxes and more taxes?
I used to be on Sanders’ email list, and he virtually never mentioned foreign policy. It’s just constant denunciations of the “free market” and constant calls for more taxes and more regulation. It’s pretty obvious that this sudden opposition to war is just an excuse for more anti-market rhetoric.
He said that if he runs he will announce by this month, so that would be right near his self-imposed deadline.
Asrich people are the only ones who actually monetarially from wars – via their munitions and weapons companies, their aircraft companies, carbon fuel companies etc, not to mention their stock speculations around war. And most of the profits come from public money, why not make those that profit from the wars pay for them? Maybe there would be less wars if the wars are not profitable?
What about imposing a “stupidity” tax on socialists?
Mr Sanders will be the keynote speaker a week from today at the “Sister Giant” event in Los Angeles. I’ll report on anything he might say re: a presidential race.
Worthy noting Sanders updated his site recently and it seems very much like he’s gearing up for a run. That run will probably be as a Democrat however.
Thanks to whoever fixed this post for me. I had a problem getting the link to The Hill.com to work.