Bernie Sanders is serving his third term in the U.S. Senate after winning re-election in 2018. His previous 16 years in the House of Representatives make him the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history.
Born in 1941 in Brooklyn, Sanders attended James Madison High School, Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago. After graduating in 1964, he moved to Vermont. In 1981, he was elected (by 10 votes) to the first of four terms as mayor of Burlington. Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York before his 1990 election as Vermont’s at-large member in Congress.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic – and the deep economic recession that it has wrought – nearly 80 percent of workers lived paycheck to paycheck, 34 million Americans were living in poverty, and, shamefully, even at the end of a long economic expansion, we had one of the highest childhood poverty rates of any major country on earth. It is a national tragedy that one out of every seven kids in this country lives in poverty, including one of out every 10 children in Vermont. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. had gone down for the third year in a row and about half of older Americans say that their retirement savings are not on track. Nearly 30 million Americans had no health insurance at all and millions more are underinsured. Nearly one in four Americans were unable to afford their prescriptions.
Even before the pandemic, millions of Americans were in dire straits, even as billionaires saw their wealth grow by the hundreds of billions of dollars each year. As we turn to rebuilding the economy from the pandemic-induced recession, Sen. Sanders will fight to ensure the next economic expansion raises the living standards of all Americans, not just those already at the top.
In order to make that more equitable future a reality, Sen. Sanders is calling for a vote to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and give a raise to nearly 40 million Americans. He will continue pushing for legislation he introduced that would curb the greed of Wall Street by taxing financial speculation and capping credit card interest rates. He will continue to fight for a Medicare for All, single-payer system to treat health care as a human right. And he will keep fighting for a tax system that requires the wealthiest families and largest corporations in this country to pay their fair share so that the workers who helped make these people and companies so rich can share in the success. We must also expand Social Security to ensure no one in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world has to suffer in poverty.
Together, we must work towards an economy that works for all of us, not just the top one percent. We must fight to create a better world for our children and grandchildren based on the principles of economic, social, racial, and environmental justice.