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.
After decades of Congress giving lobbyists and special interests free reign, the United State tax code has become rigged in favor of the wealthy and corporations. We have a tax code that enables many of the country’s largest corporations, like Amazon, General Motors, Netflix, and Chevron, to make billions in profits while paying nothing at all in taxes year after year. We have a tax code where the wealthiest 400 Americans pay a lower tax rate than the middle class on average. We have a tax code where billionaires pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries or in some cases can get away with paying nothing at all.
Sen. Sanders believes that every American should pay their fair share and works every day to rid of our tax code of the many loopholes allow the wealthy and corporations to shirk their responsibilities. He believes that corporations should not be allowed to avoid taxes by stashing their profits in offshore tax havens, which is why he proposed shutting down these dodges full stop with the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act. He believes that we should tax wealth like work, which means that investment income from capital gains and dividends should be taxed at the same rate as income from wages. He believes that we must curb financial speculation and Wall Street greed with a tax on financial transactions, which is why he introduced the Inclusive Prosperity Act. He believes we need to counter the alarming growth of wealth inequality and a new aristocracy by enacting a tax on extreme wealth and restoring the robustness of our estate tax through his bill the For the 99.8% Act.
Sen. Sanders believes we need to reverse the decades of tax cuts skewed toward the top 1%. He famously took to the Senate floor for an 8 and half hour filibuster in 2010 to protest the extension of the infamous Bush tax cuts for the rich. This speech helped propel opposition to the tax cuts into the American consciousness and Sen. Sanders eventually prevailed in reversing the Bush tax cuts for the top 1% in 2013. In 2017, Sen. Sanders was one of the strongest voices in opposition to the Trump tax cuts, which made an already skewed tax code even worse. He believes we need to reverse the Trump tax cuts for the rich and will continue to fight any efforts to extend these skewed cuts moving forward.