Renewable Revolution

Welch, aiming to put the $3.5 trillion figure in perspective, noted the country spent nearly $6 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia over the past 20 years and another $5 trillion in tax cuts for  wealthy individuals and institutions during the Republican presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

Sep 6 2021, 8:50 PM


By Kevin O'Connor

His sound bites for the common good and against corporate greed haven’t changed. But facing the biggest test of his political career, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said the stakes had never been higher.

The Vermont independent toured his home state this Labor Day weekend in support of a $3.5 trillion budget bill that, if adopted by colleagues now arguing over its price tag, would be the largest federal social spending plan in the nation’s history.

“This bill will be the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] and the New Deal of the 1930s,” he said in Springfield on Saturday as he kicked off a five-town tour that drew more than 2,000 people there and in Brattleboro, Middlebury, Newport and St. Johnsbury.

The bill could bring life to a host of Sanders’ longtime hopes, including universal pre-kindergarten, free community college, paid family and medical leave, energy efficiency and climate change improvements, price reductions on prescription drugs and the largest-ever expansions of affordable housing and Medicare health insurance to cover dental, hearing and vision care.

“My Republican colleagues are going to tell you that Bernie’s plan is going to raise taxes,” Sanders said. “They are right. We are going to raise taxes — on the billionaires and large corporations — but nobody in America who makes less than $400,000 a year will pay a penny more.”

read more:
https://vtdigger.org/2021/09/06/bernie-sanders-at-a-career-apex-faces-his-biggest-political-test-yet/