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Bernie Sanders plows into Jake Tapper for daring to ask a question he doesn’t like; refuses to answer it

February 9, 2020 | | Print Article

During an appearance Sunday morning on CNN, Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders repeatedly refused to explicitly disavow a radical proposal he made in 1974.

“Our investigative KFILE team found that early in your political career, way back in 1974, you said that it should be illegal to earn more money than someone could spend in his or her lifetime,” CNN’s Jake Tapper revealed during the appearance.

“You proposed a maximum wage cap on the highest earners,” he continued, only to then be cut off by the now-78-year-old senator.

“Look, Jake, in all due respect, that was seven years before I was elected [the mayor of Burlington, Vermont]. Did you go back to my third-grade essay, when I was in PS197 [Public School 197, a public elementary in Brooklyn]?” Sanders dismissively replied before trying to switch topics.

Listen:

“Let’s talk about my mayor’s record where I was a transformative mayor re-elected three times,” he said. “You know, we can go back to things that I said in the ‘70s. I don’t think it’s productive. I’ve been a senator for 14 years, a congressman for 16 years.”

“But here’s the bottom line. This is what I do believe: When you have three people who own more wealth than the bottom half of America, when half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, when 500,000 Americans are sleeping out on the street, yes, the rich have got to pay, and the large corporations have got to pay their fair share of taxes. We will raise taxes very substantially on billionaires. No apologies for that.”

The type of draconian taxes Sanders seeks would wreck the economy, spur massive layoffs, inevitably push even more people into poverty, and destroy the incentive to innovate and work hard.

“The great Austrian economist and writer Ludwig von Mises explained that the incentive of unequal returns is absolutely a necessary component of a successful economic system,” Sen. Rand Paul pointed out in a recent column.

“Mises writes: ‘only because inequality of wealth is possible in our social order, only because it stimulates everyone to produce as much as he can and at the lowest cost, does mankind today have at its disposal the total annual wealth now available for consumption.’ If government destroys this incentive, it also destroys productivity and economic growth.”

Not distracted by the senator’s attempted pivot, Tapper then tried again to prod him for an answer to the original question.

“But you do not favor a wage cap as you once proposed? That’s the only question,” he said.

And again Sanders tried to change the subject.

“Look, what I just said is when you have massive levels of income and wealth inequality — by the way, in the last three years under Trump, the billionaire class has seen hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars increase in their wealth. The average American worker has seen less than a one percent increase in real wages last year”.

“That’s the issue that we’ve got to deal with right now. We need an economy that works for working people not just for the billionaire class, which is what we have under Trump’s economy.”

Fact-check: FALSE.

CNBC confirmed last March that “workers at the lower end of the payscale” were “getting the most benefit from rising wages”

The Wall Street Journal provided another confirmation nine months later.

“Wages for rank-and-file workers are rising at the quickest pace in more than a decade, even faster than for bosses, a sign that the labor market has tightened sufficiently to convey bigger increases to lower-paid employees,” the outlet reported this past December.

It’s not clear why these facts are always ignored by Democrats and rarely ever mentioned by interviewers such as Tapper, who chose to drop the topic and move on to asking Sanders about failed Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s recent attacks on him.

Despite being the most radical of the Democrat candidates running for the presidency, Sanders hasn’t been alone in his attempts to distort President Donald Trump’s economy and lie to the American people about the state of their own financial lives.

Observe:

It’s lie after lie after lie …

Meanwhile, according to the latest Gallup data, an overwhelming 74 percent majority of Americans believe their personal finances are headed up, not down. But according to Sanders and crew, this indisputable fact is apparently the real lie …

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Vivek Saxena
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