Introduction
BREAKING: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just destroyed Meghan McCain’s bad faith attack on air and got a huge ovation.
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Content
What you're proposing in what Bernie Sanders proposing you said that Fox was like assuring in the apocalypse with both of you, but two conservatives like me who think that big government is very, very dangerous.
It is like the apocalypse and it's not just that.
Bernie is asking a lot of voters to buy into what I consider radical ideas like the public college, the great New Deal Medicare for all he's, advocating for a complete paradigm shift of the American system, as we know it, and it's a huge ask for people like me and it's a huge ask for a lot of people.
This seismic shift from capitalism to socialism, I think there's! One story, that's not really being told here is what's actually happening on the ground in America.
Do you know how many? What percent of American workers make less than $40,000 a year? Mm-Hmm almost 60% mmm 60% of Americans who care live on that in New York? You can't live on New York and you can barely live on that anywhere.
You can't live and and I think that that reality personally does require a paradigm shift.
This isn't working for us and a two point.
One trillion dollar tax cut, which has been deemed capitalism at its finest, doesn't work for us right, losing your husband because he couldn't afford insulin, because big pharma cares about profits more than people.
Ask capitalism at its finest does not work for us and I believe he has a hard time explaining.
I was gonna pay for it, though.
So, let's talk about how we'll pay for it, because I think we need to talk about what policies a tuition, free public college, 2.2 trillion over ten years.
So so it's funny because policies are always progressive.
Policies are always talked about in ten-year price tags.
Conservative policies always talk about in one-year price tags, and so our military budget increase went up by seventy to eighty billion dollars, one year alone about a hundred billion.
You know, since Trump started pretty much or if it's about it's been about a hundred billion increase since Trump started.
We don't ask how he pays for that.
When we talk about big government, we don't talk about big government interjecting themselves into the bodies of women and gender non-conforming people for Antichrist the reduction of government's role in places that I think are harmful but they're how to tell them how you tell them how this is getting paid for, because sure yeah, that's the that's what you want so tuition, free public colleges that can be paid by a simple Wall, Street transaction tax medicare-for-all.
What you do is that you take your premium and some of your health care costs right now that you give to a Blue, Cross, Blue, Shield and Aetna whomever, and you lower that number.
The average American family pays about ten thousand dollars in health care costs.
You lower that number and you just it transitions over to a payroll tax and the average Americans gets to save tons more money.
There was a Yale study that just came out.
That said, we could transition to Medicare for all and give two years severance to every person whose job may be risked in in the transition and still save money.
This is a OC making quick work of Megan McCain who tries to catch the freshmen congresswoman in a bad faith attack about what else, but socialism now McCain frames her question in the sense of shifting the American system from capitalism to socialism.
But I would fundamentally reject the premise of that assertion, because what progressives are advocating for in this election? Isn't socialism and for as many times as they repeat, it will refute.
It.
Republicans use this term as a catch-all, a boogeyman to scare Fox News viewers into thinking that we're gonna devolve into Venezuela, but social programs don't mean socialism because remember we already have social programs and you might be familiar with them.
Considering they're the most popular programs in America Medicare is a social program.
Medicaid is a social program.
Social Security is a social program and last time I checked, I didn't see any bread lines outside so I can promise you that if we dare to oh I, don't know give Americans access to health care or transfer to renewable energy.
It's not gonna mean that we devolve into Venezuela, it'll, mean Americans, have access to health care and that we've transitioned to renewable energy and, of course, once the Republican argument of it's all socialism, and you should be scared of that get stale.
They always fall back on the same question.
How are we gonna pay for it now? First off I just have to say that it's funny to me how Republicans suddenly become fiscal conservatives again as soon as spending isn't on their priorities, because I'm old enough to remember Republicans, absolutely blowing up the federal deficit in exchange for a tax cut for corporations and the ultra-rich I'm old enough to remember dumping, a record hundreds of billions of dollars into military spending, because Trump claims baselessly that our military was so depleted that they didn't have any bullets and I'm old enough to remember federal revenue hitting barren lows as the result of those policies, and yet, despite all of that, not a peep from the fiscal conservatives and yet when Democrats dare to suggest that we spend money on keeping people alive on making sure the planet is habitable on a quality education.
Well, we might as well be asking to colonize Mars as far as Republicans are concerned, because, if you haven't figured it out yet they aren't interested in what's best for the American people, they're interested in what's best for themselves, whether it's lowering their own tax rates or doing it for the corporations that donate to their re-election campaigns in reality, while Republicans will pretend that tax cuts and tax cuts alone are the only way forward that couldn't be farther from the truth.
And history is proof of that.
Spending coupled with a high marginal tax rate for the rich, is what has historically made this country prosperous these single most prosperous decades in US, history were the 50s and 60s when the marginal tax rate was as high as 92% and I'm, not saying that the answer is a 90 percent marginal tax rate, but it was certainly higher than it is today and, conversely, the point at which income inequality took off was in the 80s under a Republican hero, Ronald Reagan, when he lowered the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 28% and I, can try and convince you that Reaganomics or trickle-down economics doesn't work, that it destroyed America's, middle class and exploded the wealth gap between the rich and the poor, but I don't need to, because this chart does that for me and as for the attacks on single-payer health care and how we're gonna pay for it.
The simple fact is that we already do pay the most in the world for health care, sometimes as much as ten times more for a single drug.
In other words, the worst-case scenario is that we'll pay more when we're already there? Our current system is the worst case scenario that Republicans fear monger about and so everyone's screeching about how we're gonna pay for it doesn't take into that a we already do, pay the most.
It's just that our money is pilfered by the middleman by insurance companies, the top 62 CEOs of which made it combined 1.1 billion dollars.
Last year, that's an average of 18 million dollars for every CEO, while 87 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured in case that helps put into perspective.
How perverse the system is in its current form and be every other industrialized nation in the world has figured it out.
You're telling me that France has some secret formula that the United States can't crack Australia Canada the UK Denmark Sweden Switzerland Germany, Norway, Singapore, Taiwan.
Okay, we have bigger populations in these countries, then split the country in two regions like Canada.
Does it would still allow for the best negotiated rates, as opposed to each individual American battling a profit-hungry insurance giant for the best rates, and it's not about the quality of care.
Considering Americans health care quality ranks behind nearly every country, with universal health care.
For the first time ever, Americans life expectancies are falling.
So, let's just be honest here, this isn't about some magical formula that we can't figure out.
This isn't about our size or our population or the quality of care.
This is about corporate greed.
This is about health insurance companies, dumping buckets of cash into the coffers of politicians, primarily Republicans, so that they can continue to reap windfalls from the system so that they can continue to profit off of our lives.
So people like Meghan McCain can pretend that progressive, compassionate policies that ensure at least a bare minimum of dignity or something to be afraid of.
But the only thing to be afraid of here is the greed of a tiny number of people at the top, who are hell-bent on manipulating everyone else in the country on office, getting the facts and fear-mongering and diverting our attention all so they can continue hoarding the majority of wealth at the exclusion of everyone else.
If you ask me that is what we should be afraid of.