Bernie Sanders Hits Billionaire Space Race, Vows To Help Working Families
Income gap widest it's been in a century, he says
With the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of Americans the widest it's been in a century — and with just two super-rich Americans who own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the country combined — Sen Bernie Sanders condemned the recent “billionaire's space race.”
However, the Vermont independent also pledged that help for struggling American families is on its way.
“Incredibly, during the pandemic we are experiencing now, billionaires in America have seen their wealth increase by $1.8 trillion during this pandemic — while at the same time, thousands of essential workers died providing the goods and services we needed,” Sanders said Monday in remarks on the Senate floor. “Billionaires become richer; ordinary people have to go to work — public transit, grocery stores, hospitals — and thousands die.”
Sanders sought to contrast the folly of two of the richest men on Earth — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Virgin businessman Richard Branson — each making separate trips last month into space, with the serious business about to get underway in the Senate on behalf of struggling American families.
“While some of our multi-, multi-billionaires are spending some of their enormous amounts of money flying off into outer space, today — and in the coming days — we are going to address the crises facing working families right here on the ground, on planet Earth,” Sanders said. “That is why, as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, I'm proud to introduce a $3.5 trillion budget resolution that we will soon be considering — I expect tomorrow.”
Senate Democrats plan to approve Sanders’ budget proposal by way of a Senate procedure known as “reconciliation,” which Republicans cannot block with a filibuster.
Sanders described his spending plan as “the most consequential and most comprehensive piece of legislation for working people, for the elderly, for the children, for the sick and for the poor, that this body has addressed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, in the 1930s.”
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