Bernie Sanders has sponsored a bill in the Senate that would impose a severe tax penalty on any company that pays their CEO more than 50 times what their average worker makes. The law likely won’t pass, but at least someone in DC is paying attention to this problem. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Bernie Sanders has sponsored a bill in the Senate that would impose a severe tax penalty on any company that pays their CEO more than 50 times what the average worker makes. The law, it’s not gonna pass. But don’t you love that Bernie Sanders says, I don’t really care. I wanna make this, I want the public to understand that there are companies that are paying their CEOs 500 times what the average workers making. And he’s saying, I wanna put this on the table. And I wanna say, I wanna show you what it’s doing to these workers and how these folks making 500 times what the workers making. They don’t even need the money. They’re already living in massive mansions. They’re flying jets. They’ve got yachts. They’ve got all this stuff. They don’t need anything else. But we’re still paying ’em 500 times what the worker makes.
Farron Cousins: Back in the sixties and the seventies, when we actually had a robust middle class here in the United States, the CEO to worker pay was about 25 to 35 to one. So you make a dollar, your boss at the very top of that company was making 25 bucks. But today it is 400 to 500 times more. And we have allowed that gap to just grow exponentially. And Bernie Sanders, like you said, he knows this isn’t gonna pass. He’s not gonna get the 60 votes to clear that filibuster hurdle. But what he’s doing is he is making sure that the country knows one, that this is happening. Two, that legislatively we could do something about it. And three, that, listen, I do understand your problems and here it is. Here is the solution. Y’all gotta get all these other folks in here to follow suit.
Mike Papantonio: Well, and he says, look, if we do this, it’ll generate, first of all, $150 billion in tax revenue for the United States. Of course, the people screaming Walmart, Google, Home Depot, JP Morgan, McDonald’s, they’re having conniptions right now, even though they know the chances. They’ve spread so much money around. I mean, you get some lame brain legislator that is, the guy comes into Congress and he’s making, maybe he’s making a hundred thousand dollars a year. He’s making a ton of money from all these political donations. They’ve changed his life. He’s making tons of money with insider trading. This is not an issue that these folks worry about. They know they can make this go away. But I just love that Bernie Sanders says, well, you know, I might not win. This might be DOA, this could be totally, but we’re gonna have the discussion. Now, I want you to watch, this is Reuters. Okay. What, five paragraphs, maybe five paragraphs. Watch what corporate media does with this story. If you can find it, please let us know. Send us on a comment, wow, we actually found MSNBC and CNN talking about this. You won’t see it.
Farron Cousins: Well, and they may talk about like, oh, Bernie’s wasting everybody’s time. He knows he’s not gonna pass it. Listen, this is the kind of stuff that Biden should be talking about this year.
Mike Papantonio: Of course, of course.
Farron Cousins: He should be holding press conferences, doing speeches publicly, talking about these things. That’s I think mostly what Bernie’s trying to do is he’s trying to push him because Bernie is a great smart politician. And he
Mike Papantonio: He’s a good speaker.
Farron Cousins: And he is, and he’s trying to kind of give it to Biden. You’re spoon feeding him, but he’s not taking it.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, Biden could sit in his cellar like last election and do this. He doesn’t have to bumble his way up onto a stage in front of a podium. He can say, he can deliver these messages cleanly. Where we’re not worried about is he gonna fall off stage? He can do it down in his cellar with a great message to the American public. This would be a great message.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: It’d be the kind of thing we want to hear from a president.
