An interview with Bernie Sanders: Deficit Hawk

[magical thyme]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/06/23/an-interview-with-bernie-sanders-deficit-hawk/
The deficit is a significant issue but it is important to know how we got into a deficit and our national debt. Very often at budget hearings you will hear me say as the major deficit hawk in the committee — and I refer to myself as that because I voted against the war in Iraq, I voted against tax breaks for millionaires, I voted against the Medicare prescription drug program, I voted against the deregulation of Wall Street, which has caused so many problems. The question is how do you do deficit reduction in a way that is fair. I’m a deficit hawk when I say we have to ask the wealthiest people and the largest corporations to pay their fair share. That’s a deficit hawk.

You have long been critical of the Robert Rubin style of economics that has often dominated thinking among Democrats in recent years. Who would you bring in to change that conversation? Who should have a bigger seat the table?

I’d bring Joseph Stiglitz who is a Nobel Prize winning economist. You’d get people like Robert Reich who is teaching out at University of California. He is a former secretary of Labor who has been very good. There are other progressive economists who are doing a very good job of describing why the middle class is disappearing.

Is there any way to fix Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) or would you scrap it and move on?

(hint: he'd scrap it and move on ) more at link

[Thinkingabout]

1. Voting against the war did not create a deficit, voting for the funding created a larger deficit.

Bernie voted yes on many funding bills and increasing troops.

[Thinkingabout]

3. Yes she did, she voted for IWR and AUMF, Bernie gets up and says he voted against the war but he

did not say he voted for AUMF which funded the war.