We all know Bernie Sanders is a Sandalista, communist crush having, half baked socialist, but now that the Papa Smurf of the Democratic party is running for president, some of his crazier positions are getting a second look. Like, oh, the maximum wage. As the Atlantic explains:
All three Democratic candidates favor raising the minimum wage up to somewhere between $12 and $15 an hour. But forget, for a moment, the minimum wage—what about establishing a maximum wage?
It’s a question that no candidate is asking at the moment, but it’s one Bernie Sanders used to be preoccupied with, starting in the 1970s. Back then, during one of Sanders’s early Senate campaigns, one local Vermont newspaper wrote that he wanted to “make it illegal to amass more wealth than a human family could use in a lifetime.” Sanders was apparently still batting the idea around until at least the early ‘90s, when he submitted a Los Angeles Times op-ed by the journalist Sam Pizzigati titled “How About a Maximum Wage?” to the congressional record. (The Sanders campaign has been contacted for comment but has not yet replied.)
Here’s how it’d work: Right now, any dollar an American earns beyond a certain amount (about $450,000) is taxed at 39.6 percent. This is America’s top marginal tax rate, and lower marginal tax rates are applied to money earned under other lower thresholds. Sanders’s one-time plan for a maximum wage was simple: Set a threshold above which the marginal tax rate is 100 percent, so that every dollar earned beyond it would go straight to the government.
Bernie has softened a bit since then- he said today at Georgetown that he does’nt believe that government should own the means of production(whew!), but it it should horrify all normal Americans that a man with such nutty policy ideas is a contender in two early Democratic primaries.
AAN Staff
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