Pres. Candidate Bernie Sanders: $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill Could Lower Youth Unemployment

Pajamas Media ^ | 05/02/2015 | by Nicholas Ballasy

[SeekAndFind]

^[1]

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said at a town hall meeting the minimum wage should be raised to $15 per hour and advocated for expanding Social Security benefits.

“If one person is making $18 million and another person is making $118,000 a year, who pays more into Social Security? Neither, they’re paying the same because there is a cap upon which after you, at a certain level, you don’t pay anything more and that level is about $118,000,” Sanders said at the meeting in Washington.

“If you lift that cap, and you don’t have to start at $119,000, you can start at $250,000. If you just do that, Social Security will be solvent until the year 2065 and we can increase benefits – that’s part of the legislation I’ve recently introduced,” he added.

Sanders, a member of the Senate Budget Committee and now a presidential candidate ^[2], said Social Security would be solvent for another 20 years if the U.S. had the same distribution of wealth today as it did 30 years ago.

“Just because more people would be paying into the Social Security trust fund,” he said. “The major issue is how we deal with the multi-trillion dollar shift of wealth that has disappeared from working families and gone to the top one tenth of one percent, and if we can redistribute that down we will solve many problems.”

Over the last 30 years, Sanders said, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth in the wrong direction.

“Our job is to turn that around,” he said.

Addressing his support for a $15 minimum wage, Sanders said, “I’m not going to say that’s a perfect solution” but it is “the direction we should go.”

The White House supports a $10.10 per hour minimum wage.

Sanders ^[3] told the town hall meeting he expects President Obama to raise the income threshold for overtime pay in the next few months.

“Here’s the deal: you work at McDonalds, you make $28,000 per year, you’re a supervisor of two people flipping hamburgers. Being that supervisor and making more than $23,500, you are not eligible for time and a half so what we have asked the president to do is to raise that number to somewhere around $55,000,” he said. “I believe the president will do something like that in the next couple of months and that would put a lot of money into the pockets of a lot of people.”

Sanders also said his $1 trillion infrastructure bill could help lower the 17 percent youth unemployment rate.

“How do you get jobs for those kids? Well, one way to do it is I introduced a $1 trillion infrastructure rebuilding bill, which would create about 13 million jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges and water systems and waste water plants and levees and dams and airports,” he said. “Think about how America would look when we have people giving us a first-class infrastructure – that’s what we should be thinking about.”

Sanders said the budget introduced by Senate Republicans would not balance the federal budget over 10 years.

“When they talk about deficit spending, these guys are very selective,” he said. “Throwing people off of Medicaid, that’s one way you can do it, that’s what they believe.”

Senate Democrats have criticized the budget proposal for repealing the expansion of Medicaid eligibility under Obamacare.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

How about the exact *opposite*? That is, stop ALL new enrollments in Social Security and Medicare. This would effectively *halve* the income tax young people would pay, so they could be paid less, employers could hire more, and they would keep more of the money they earned, rather than having it squittered away by Washington bureaucrats.

So, by getting government’s deceitful FICA tax off their backs, it would do more for them than any amount of government programs “in their behalf”.

[CIB-173RDABN]

Want jobs for young people (especially with no skill)?

Step 1 - repeal all minimum wage laws.

There are millions of jobs not being done today simply because the benefit to the person willing to hire someone to do the job is not worth minimum wage (plus all the government required benefits.)

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Any paving project I’ve been around has required trained workers...

[L,TOWM]

>>>>>>>>Lower the corporate tax rate to 15% and give amnesty to dollars hidden overseas.<<<<<<<<<

Why lower it all? Corporate profits were reported at close to 3 Trillion last year and they paid $220 Billion in actual taxes. A corporate tax rate of 15% would actually be a tax hike, if the corporations had to pay taxes on their GAAP earnings. Under the current system, these a-holes laugh their way to the bank while they legally cook the books with “tax accounting”.

I am not too sure whether I should be laughing or screaming at the comments on this thread. Everyone on this forum wants to reign in government and empower the corporations. Check out DU and they want the Government to be almighty and the corporations shut down.

The problem with both of those positions is that the government and big business are one and the same. This has been reality for a couple of decades now.

[USNBandit]

If they wanted to sure up Social Security they could pass a law requiring E-verify. Employers that want to keep their illegal employees would pay a nominal fee to pay for criminal background checks and CIS processing. The illegal would be granted a sponsored guest worker permit. The FICA tax payed by both employer and employee would not be attributed to the guest worker but would be a fine against illegal presence in the U.S. Any path to citizenship would be independent of this program. Commit a crime, get deported, regardless of family status.

Messing with a 12% increase in wages is way safer than messing with up to a 50% increase by raising the minimum wage to $15. Also works towards a better solution for illegal labor, a substantial cause of low wage unemployment.

[Theoria]

'”his $1 trillion infrastructure bill could help lower the 17 percent youth unemployment rate.”'

Haven't we tried that in Iraq and Afghanistan? Joy.

[redfreedom]

It’s just unbelievable, the criminals, the misfits, flakes, control freaks and oddballs that the democrats have crawling out to run for President. They have no shame. They all make FDR look good.

[Mr. K]

Just like the LAST $1 Trillion?

[servantboy777]

We have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. 35%. Large part of corporate taxes are paid by small,medium,large businesses....not multinationals.

I agree with your premise. You do make a great point. I am not advocating empowering the corporations...we've been there and currently living it.

Many corporations pay ZERO taxes, but we cannot drive jobs overseas by keeping the tax rates so high.

[Carthego delenda est]

“Require all persons that receive government assistance to perform a function to help society. Clean parks, roadways, attendants, graffiti cleanup, meals on wheels...whatever. Functions the government pays for now would be transferred to those on gubbamint assistance. No Mo free rides.”

So basically the people who loose their jobs by being replaced by those receiving assistance, would end up back in the same job when they go in for assistance due to loosing their government contract job. Lol

[hinckley buzzard]

“How do you get jobs for those kids? Well, one way to do it is I introduced a $1 trillion infrastructure rebuilding bill, which would create about 13 million jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges and water systems and waste water plants and levees and dams and airports,” he said"

Because I sure want my dams and bridges built by unskilled untrained undisciplined slacker "kids."

[HLPhat]

From each according to their ability... to each according to their need?

[PhiloBedo]

Bernie, y, do you mean the way the TARP infrastructure plan created all those shovel ready jobs???

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Sanders' job is to make Hillary more "moderate" to voters.

His proposals Hillary will say "goes too far" then she'll introduce her own, slightly-less socialist proposals.

Then her media flunkies will force the Republican candidates to adopt her positions or else they're extremists.

The majority of Republican candidates will cave.

[B212]

I always have a good laugh, when I hear that the solution to poverty is to increase the minimum wage....so increase the wages for the dry cleaner workers, and the owner increases the cost of dry cleaning....increase MacDonalds' wages and the cost of hamburgers goes up....a never ending spiral....one time many years ago, I was in the Air force, based in a military town, the moment our salary/wages increased, every thing in town went up in price....many times more than the percentage increase in our salaries.

[americanparatrooper]

Socialist never tire of spending other people's money! What happened to the 1 trillion for “shovel ready jobs!” O, that's right, there really were not any [shovel ready jobs] that was the con to the American people who foot the tax bill for all this spending, instead the 1 trillion dollars went into Union thugs pensions funds and in return, the Union thugs then gave it back to the democrats (socialist) for their reelections! What a racket eh!

Now Bernie Sanders (avowed socialist) wants to spend another 1 trillion dollars of your hard earned tax dollars for communities made up of mostly minorities who, the majority are in all honesty unemployed and are collecting welfare and simply do not pay taxes.

That will work Bernie, since that has never been tried by you socialist! O, but, wait, it has!

22 Trillion dollars has been taken from hard working Americans and paid out to the so called “poor minority communities” under several guises of “war on poverty” “welfare” “health-care” and on and on and on it goes!

Today, the minority communities controlled by the socialist for more than 50 years are now rioting and burning their cities, claiming police abuse, no jobs, bad schools, crumbling infrastructure, and so on! How can this be? These cities are controlled by the socialist democrats who claim to be on the side of the poor and down trodden minorities in this Country?

Sounds like the bloom is certainly off the rose and another trillion dollars for minority communities is not going to change one damn thing, other than fooling the minority community into voting for another avowed socialist and expecting those communities to change.

Is that not the very definition of insanity? I think so, but, never let the facts get in the way of a liberal socialist and their “feelings!” As long as the socialist in this country are spending your money to garner the minority vote, who in the hell are we to complain, after all, they have been doing this for more than 70 years, nothing changes!

[BobL]

Sanders ONLY PURPOSE in running is to give The Hag an opponent to make her look somewhat moderate. It’s not a bad strategy on her part.

[mjp]

I introduced a $1 trillion infrastructure rebuilding bill, which would create about 13 million jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges and water systems and waste water plants and levees and dams and airports,

His ideas require increases in the money supply which leads to inflation. Inflation plays a major role in the decline and decay of the infrastructure. Government officials usually shortsighted and incompetent to begin with, rarely allow for the destructive effect of inflation on the replacement costs of the assets they manage.Thus, as inflation pours new and additional revenues into their hands, they proceed as though the revenues were available for the expansion of government activities, and neglect the need to devote an adequate portion of them to replacement and maintenance at progressively rising prices. Thus, this is another case of libtard perversity of result.

[Vendome]

I predict a laugh-a-thon by CEO’s and only 6% of the monies will ever be used for infrastructure improvement

[Bluestocking]

Just a few years ago, the French version of Bernie Sanders led his socialist party to victory by promising the same socialist utopia as Bernie Sanders is now promising Democratic party voters if they nominate him for president.

And what happened to France? After the French socialists gained power, many of France’s wealthy citizens left the country instead of waiting to have their life savings taxed at 80 percent; the country went into recession; and the new socialist president’s approval ratings fell to 15 percent.

The only utopia that was created was experienced by British and Swiss bankers as their coffers began to overflow with a flood of new French money.

So what can we expect in America now that Bernie Sanders has stepped up to deliver tax-the-rich-and-redistribute-the-money-to-the-poor applause lines that will echo across the land? If the majority of the entire French electorate was fooled by socialist promises, surely the majority of the Democratic party with its socialist ideology will be similarly fooled by Bernie Sanders’ visions of a glorious future free of capitalism.

How will Hillary be able to fight this? In 2008, the Democrats chose Barack Obama instead of Hillary because he would be the first Black President. In 2016, what will stop the Democrats from choosing Bernie Sanders over Hillary so that he can become our first socialist president?