>The naysayers claim he's talking about a redistribution of wealth - but one has to remember that over the past 30 or 40 years we've already had a huge redistribution of wealth in this country - it all went to the rich - which is also where almost all of the new wealth goes right now. Sander's concepts will work and they've worked in the past - look at Franklin Roosevelt as a prime example of this. Personally I would rather see my tax dollars spent on sending kids to college rather than sending them to prison - and what you call a freebie actually pays for itself in time and makes society a better place for everyone to boot.
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>Ummmm - even if you took away 100% of the wealth of the 1%, you still couldn't pay off the national debt. So how do you propose that we pay down some of (what will soon be - thanks to Obama) our 20 trillion dollars in debt if we are spending all of our tax money on freebies?
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>BTW, Franklin Roosevelt was not one of my heroes. IMHO, his policies prolonged the misery of the Great Depression - much like Obama's policies have, in large measure, kept us from recovering from the Great Recession.

Ah yes - that old argument. Republicans have done a fabulous job of conning the voting public into believing that WWII got us out of the depression.
It it was actually President Roosevelt’s progressive economic programs that he began in 1932 that got us out of the depression. Those policies benefited our country for the next 50 years. They not only got us out of the Great Depression, they helped us create the biggest and most vibrant middle class in history.
Then, in 1980, Republicans began reversing the process—and began the decline of the middle class. If you make a chart of three variables since 1930—the national deficit, the top income tax rate, and the top inheritance tax rate—indicates what political policies create debt and which policies reduce debt.
When government reduces taxes on those benefiting most from an economy , the deficit increases. When workers’ wages stagnate or decline, to the point where many don’t make enough money to pay taxes, the deficit explodes.
When government has a progressive tax on those benefiting most from society, the deficit goes down. When workers’ wages are increasing, and they pay more taxes, the deficit goes down.