Ezra Klein: Tell me what it means to be a socialist.
Bernie Sanders: A democratic socialist. What it means is that one takes a hard look at
countries around the world who have successful records in fighting and implementing programs
for the middle class and working families. When you do that you automatically go to countries
like Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and other countries which have had labor governments
or social democratic governments, and what you find is that in virtually all of those
countries, health care is a right of all people and their systems are far more cost effective
than ours, college education is virtually free in all of those countries, people retire
with benefits, wages that people receive are often higher, distribution of wealth and income
is much fairer, their public education systems are generally stronger than ours.
By and large their governments tend to represent the needs of their middle class and working
families rather than billionaires and campaign contributors. When I talk about being a democratic
socialist, those are the countries that I am looking at and those are the ideas that
I think we can learn a lot from. Ezra Klein: What is the underlying principle
there? What are the situations where you look at a given area of the economy say, "That's
something we should turn over to the market," or, "That's something we should possibly federalize?"
Bernie Sanders: Good questions. Health care, to my mind, is a right of all people. That's
what I believe. I think every man, woman and child is entitled to health care and that
right exists in virtually every other major industrialized country on earth. We are the
odd guys out there. Despite the modest gains of the Affordable Care Act we have 35 million
people who still have no health insurance, and more importantly, millions more are under-insured
with high co-payments and high deductibles. I believe in Medicare for all people and I
believe that is not an area where private insurance companies should be functioning,
because once you have private insurance companies, their goal is to make as much money as possible,
not to provide quality care. In terms of health care, yeah, we should have a public healthcare
system guaranteeing health care to all people in a cost effective way. I'm thinking a Medicare,
full single payer approach is the way to do it.
In terms of education, I don't know how you have the United States being competitive in
a global economy if we do not have the best educated workforce in the world. What does
that mean? It means that everybody should be able to get all of the education they need,
regardless of the income of their families. What does that mean? It means we should go
back to where we were 50 years ago and what Germany and many other countries [are doing],
and say, "You want to go to college? You have the ability to go to college? You have the
desire to go to college? Public colleges and universities will be tuition free," because
education must be a right of all people. It seems to me that when you look at basic
necessities of life: Education, health care, nutrition, there must be a guarantee that
people receive what they need in order to live a dignified life.
Ezra Klein: Implicit in what you just said and knowing some of your sort of policies
around this, you want to see the government barking down healthcare prices quite a bit
lower than they are now. Americans pay much higher prices ...
Bernie Sanders: Let me interrupt you, the answer's absolutely yes.
Ezra Klein: Yeah, so I have a slightly different question off of that, though. The argument
people make about that is that a tremendous amount of healthcare innovation around the
world are other countries freeloading on the amount of money Americans pay to induce innovation
in the pharmaceutical sector in the medical device sector. Do you worry that if we got
to that point we would actually see a slow down in healthcare innovation?
Bernie Sanders: I don't. A lot of the money in health care research goes into me-too drugs,
copycat drugs where they will come up with another drug that really doesn't substantially
increase the kinds of benefits that it has on the patient. In my view, this issue of
the high cost of prescription drugs is a huge issue, it's an economic issue, it is a moral
issue and I very much reject what goes on in this country right now. Right now in America,
uniquely among major countries, drug companies can double the prices for a drug tomorrow
for no particular reason, just because they can make more money. We have seen that with
name brand drugs, now we're seeing it increasingly with generic drugs.
I think absolutely that the cost of prescription drugs should be regulated. I will never forget
- it was kind of a moment I will remember for my whole life - taking a group of Vermont
women across the border to Canada where they purchased medicine they needed for breast
cancer at 1/10th the price they were paying in the United States of America. I also find
it very interesting that many of my friends who are great free traders, who want to see
lettuce and tomatoes brought in from small farms in Mexico, have no problem with the
fact that we cannot import prescription name brand prescription drugs from other countries
around the world. That speaks to the power of the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma, very
powerful lobbying forces, forcing us to pay high prices in this country.
I talk to physicians who work in working class communities and they tell me one quarter of
the prescriptions they write are not filled. That is insane. I think we need to deal with
the cost of prescription drugs very, very differently than is currently the case.
Ezra Klein: Something that’s in that answer, but also
in what you said being a democratic socialist, is a more international view. I think if you
take global poverty that seriously it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered
out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit,
even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing ...
Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.
Ezra Klein: Really? Bernie Sanders:Of course. That's a right wing
proposal which says essentially there is no United States ...
Ezra Klein: But it would make ... Bernie Sanders: Excuse me ...
Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?
Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer, you're doing away with the
concept of a nation state and I don't think there's any country in the world which believes
in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or
UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything
we can to help poor people. What right wing people in this country would love is an open
border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for 2 or $3 an hour, that would be great
for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I
think we have to do everything we can to create the millions of jobs.
I was just on the floor a few minutes ago. You know what youth unemployment in the United
States of America today? If you're white high school graduate, it’s 33%, Hispanic 36%,
African American 51%. Do you think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage
workers or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?
I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized
world to address the problems of international poverty but you don't do that by making people
in this country even poorer. Ezra Klein: Then what are the responsibilities
that we have? Someone who is poor by US standards is quite well off by say, Malaysian standards,
so of the calculation goes so easily to the benefit of the person in the US, how do we
think about that responsibility? I agree. you have a nation-state structure.
You always are going to, the politics don’t allow anything else. But philosophically,
the question is how do you weight it? How do you think about what the foreign aid budget
should be? How do you think about poverty abroad?
Bernie Sanders: I do weigh it. As a United States senator
in Vermont, my first obligation is to make certain kids in my state and kids all over
this country have the ability to go to college, which is why I am supporting tuition-free
public colleges and universities. I believe we should create millions of jobs rebuilding
our crumbling infrastructure and ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their
fair share of taxes. I believe we should raise the minimum wage to at least 15 bucks an hour
so people in this county are not living in poverty. I think we end the disgrace of some
20% of our kids living in poverty in America. Now how do you do that?
What you do is understand there's been a huge redistribution of wealth in the last 30 years
from the middle class to the top 1/10 to 1%. The other thing that you understand globally
is a horrendous imbalance in terms of wealth in the world. As I mentioned earlier, the
top 1% will own more than the bottom 99% in a year or so. That's absurd. That takes you
to programs like the IMF and so forth and so on.
I think what we need to be doing as a global economy is making sure that people in poor
countries have decent paying jobs, have education, have healthcare, have nutrition for their
people. That is a moral responsibility, but you don't do that as some would suggest, by
lowering the standard of American workers which has already gone down very significantly.
Ezra Klein: Do you think service-sector jobs can be made into high wage jobs?
Bernie Sanders: Not only do I think they can, I know they can. If you look at what the culinary
workers have done in Las Vegas, you have people who are cleaning toilets, who are making beds,
who are making $35-40,000 a year and have good health-care benefits. So the answer is
there's nothing magical. I mean, what we have historically seen in this country, until recently,
is that if you worked at a union factory in Detroit, and this is changing, sadly as part
of the race to the bottom – you can make a middle-class wage, $20-$25 an hour, you
have good benefits, you have a retirement program. And that's being attacked every single
day. There's nothing holy about working in a factory
as opposed to making a bed or cleaning a toilet. In the case of workers in the hotel industry,
we have seen with good unions they can in fact earn a living wage and good benefits.
Ezra Klein: So is it fair to say then that your strategy for bringing back that middle
class for improving those jobs is increasing union density?
Bernie Sanders: Oh absolutely. No question about it.
Ezra Klein: How do you do that? Bernie Sanders: You do that by passing legislation
which makes it easier for workers to join unions. Right now it is pretty hard. I'm not
telling you every worker wants to join a union, that's not true, but you've got millions of
people who do. Right now employers are able to take workers, put them in a private room,
threaten them that if this company becomes union we're moving to China, or say that if
you try and organize the union, well, you've been late lately, I'm afraid we’ll have
to fire you. I think we have to make it easier. There's
legislation — which I support — the Employee Free Choice Act that says if 50 percent of
workers in an agency plus one sign a union card, they have a union. And I believe in
that. Ezra Klein: That legislation had, as I remember,
virtually every Democrat sign onto it in 2008, and Democrats had huge majorities in Congress
in 2009 and it just didn't go anywhere. What makes you optimistic it can be passed?
Bernie Sanders: I think what we need in this country is to understand that given the power
of corporate America, the billionaire class, the big campaign contributors, what takes
place in the United States Congress today has nothing to do with the reality of middle-class
working families in this country. It has to do with the power of big money. The only way
that real change is going to take place is when millions of people get involved in the
political process and tell the United States Congress and any president of the United States
that you have to start working for us and not just for the wealthiest people in this
country. When that happens, huge things occur. Let me give you an example. Three or four
years ago, the minimum wage was 7 and a quarter, and no one was talking about it. You know
what's happened because of grassroots organizing? Not only have city and states raised the minimum
wage because of grassroots activism, what you saw recently a few weeks ago in a Wall
Street Journal poll, by a 10% margin the American people think we should raise the minimum wage,
not to $10.10 which Republicans oppose, but to 15 bucks.
Give you another example. Social Security. You have heard here in Washington virtually
every Republican wants to cut Social Security, right? That's their mantra. You know what
the American people want according to that same poll by a 3 to 1 margin? They don't want
to cut Social Security, they want to expand Social Security benefits by lifting the cap
on taxable income. When you organize at the grassroots level,
whether it's gay rights, raising the minimum wage, expanding social security, that's when
change takes place. Ezra Klein: I think a lot of people would
have thought that the amount of grassroots support democrats had in 2008 would've led
to that kind of effect. Why don't you think it did?
Bernie Sanders: Because the democrats to a large degree, are separated from working families.
Are the Democrats 10 times, 100 times, better on all of the issues than the Republicans?
They surely are, but I think it would be hard to imagine if you walked out of here or walked
down the street or went a few miles away from here and you stopped somebody on the street
and you said, "Do you think that the Democratic Party is the party of the American working
class?" People would look at you and say, "What are you talking about?"
There was a time I think under Roosevelt, maybe even under Truman, where it was perceived
that working people were part of the Democratic Party. I think for a variety of reasons, a
lot having to do with money and politics, that is no longer the case. In my view that
is exactly what shouldn't be happening. Instead of spending all of our time raising money
I think we should go out organizing people and getting them to unite around a progressive
agenda which expands the middle class, which tells the billionaire class that they cannot
have it all, which says to corporate America, "You're going to have to start paying your
fair share of taxes," which says we're going to raise the minimum wage, we're going to
make college available to all regardless of their income, that we are going to have pay
equity for women workers, that we are going to create millions of jobs rebuilding our
crumbling infrastructure. You need a progressive agenda, then you need the ability to go out
and organize people. When that happens, things change here, it's not the other way around.
Ezra Klein: What does it mean to organize people?
Bernie Sanders: That's a great question. In terms of my campaign, on July 29th we will
be holding, as I understand it, at least 1,000 organizing meetings simultaneously all over
this country involving 20 or 30,000 people. What we will be urging our supporters to do
is to go out, knock on doors, register the people to vote, talk about the important issues
facing our country in a way that the media very often does not. Talk to our Republican
friends and neighbors and ask them why they are voting for candidates who are prepared
to send their jobs to China, deny their kids the ability to have healthcare or get a higher
education, engage people in that discussion. I often make the joke, although it's not such
a joke, is that if we can spend half of the time in this country talking about why the
middle class is collapsing as opposed to football or baseball, we would revolutionize what's
going on in America. I want that discussion. I want to know why the rich get richer and
everybody else gets poorer. I want to know why the United States is the only major country
on earth that doesn't provide health care to all of its people. The only major country
that doesn't have family and medical leave so that women can stay home with their kids
when they have a baby. Those are the questions we should be discussing.
Ezra Klein: You talk a lot about the class outcomes in the American economy. Another
way of cutting a lot of these issues, and it came up when you talked about youth employment,
is by race. Do you think we need specific issues to address the racial wealth gap, the
racial jobs gap? Bernie Sanders:
Sure. Everybody knows that racism has existed from day one. Think about what we did – what
people who came from Europe did to the Native Americans, the atrocities committed. Think
about the horrors of slavery. Think about what we did to the Asian folks that came to
build the railroads and the Asian Exclusion Act. Think about discrimination against Italians,
Irish, Jews, virtually everybody else who was not like the people who were here. What
we're seeing today is of course some people developing a wage issue between Native born
Americans and those people who have come into our country.
We have 51% of African American kids who are unemployed, the poverty rates in the African
American community are far higher than whites, the wealth ownership much lower than Whites,
so of course we have that gap. What we have got to do is create economic
policies that improve the lives of all of our people. The white working class is disappearing,
the middle class is disappearing, and it's worse in Hispanic and African American communities. We've got to come together and create policies that improve the lives of all working class people.
In terms of prejudice, yeah of course, that's an extra issue. Is there racism in America?
Of course there is. We've seen an explosion of that recently.
Ezra Klein: What about the social networks of politicians.
And what I'm asking there is the most trackable relationship between the rich and the middle class are donations and lobbying expenditures.
But a lot of the reason Democratic administrations have so many Wall Street members in them
is that politicians end up traveling in the CEO/Wall Street class. I'm curious how you
think the actual class of people's social networks ends up affecting political outcomes.
Bernie Sanders: The answers is you're right, but I would approach it from another way.
If I am a regular politician and I need to raise $20 million to run for the United States
Senate or $50 million, where am I going to go to? You think I'm going to go to the American
Legion hall? A trade union hall, talk to working class people? Especially with Citizens United,
candidates are increasingly dependent on the very, very wealthy.
I'm a regular politician and I'm proud, by the way, the vast majority of our money comes
from working people, not from the rich, but if I'm a normal politician who needs to raise
$20, $50 million, where am I going to go? I'm going to sit down with the wealthy, I'm
going to go to the country club, I'm going to do my fundraisers at fancy resorts and
I get to know those people. But that's the whole point of this corrupt campaign finance
system. If you're going to contribute a million dollars to my super PAC, well maybe it's you're
a hell of a nice guy and you like to participate or maybe you want something. I think you want
something and you and I are going to become really good buddies so I can do your bidding.
In other words, the millionaire class and the billionaire class increasingly own the
political process and they own the politicians that go to them for money.
I worry very much, and I say this from the bottom of my heart that we are moving very,
very quickly from a democratic society, one person one vote, to an oligarchic form of
society determining who the elected officials of this country are. I'm going to do everything
I can to stop that. Ezra Klein: When you say you want to see elections
be publicly funded, do you want to cut the ability to privately fund them?
Bernie Sanders: The first thing that I want to do is overturn the Citizens United Supreme
Court decision, which is a total disaster. Free speech does not equal the ability of
people to buy elections and what I've said is if elected President of the United States,
any Supreme Court nominee I make will make it very clear that he or she is going to vote
to overturn Citizens United. Second of all, I think what you want to do
is at least make sure that candidates who are running will have as much money as their
opponents who may have unlimited sums of money. Thirdly, I think there are various ways, and
we're going to come out with a position on it, various ways that you can approach the
issue. One way which I find intriguing is that you basically provide $100 for every
citizen in the United States of America and you say to that person, "Here's your hundred
bucks, you can make a contribution, you can get a hundred dollar tax credit if you spend
$100 on any candidate you want." I think that would democratize very significantly the political
process in America and take us a long way away from these super PACS controlled by billionaires
who are now buying election. Ezra Klein: I want to make a turn to foreign
policy. Is there a particular foreign policy school of thought you ascribe to? Do you describe
yourself as a realist or a democratic socialist? Bernie Sanders: I don't know what that means.
I trust we're all realists. Ezra Klein: I’m not sure we are.
Bernie Sanders: I don’t know what that word means. Look, here's what I will tell you.
When you talk about foreign policy you're talking about many, many things, but maybe
the most important thing that you're talking about is war. Voting to go to war is the most
difficult decision that any member of Congress has to make. I'll tell you a little bit about
my foreign policy history, if you like. I was elected in 1990 to the House. You remember
the first Gulf War once Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait? The first Bush was telling us the
only alternative was war. The only way we can get them out, you have your whole world
united against Saddam Hussein and President Bush was saying the only way we can get him
out is an invasion of that region. I voted no. No was a tough vote because most people
believed that we should go to war. In 2003 the second Bush told us that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction, that it was absolutely imperative that we invade Iraq,
that our soldiers would come home in 6 months, that we would establish democracy in Iraq
and perhaps the whole region, everything would be wonderful. I didn't believe it and if you
check the speeches I gave on the floor of the House, sadly much of what I said about
the destabilizing impact of that invasion turned out to be true.
I'm not a pacifist and I understand that sometimes you do have to go to war. I think war is the
very, very, very last option. In terms of Iran, which is what we're dealing with right
now, I applaud the President and I applaud Secretary Kerry for their enormously difficult
work of trying to reach out an agreement with the P5 plus 1 in Iran, to try to figure out
how we can prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon which to me is an absolute imperative,
but you do it in a way that doesn't go to war. I get very nervous, I get very nervous
listening to many of my Republican colleagues who apparently have learned nothing from the
war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and they're ready to go, to war again, that's the simple
truth. I am the former chairman of the Senate Veterans
Committee. Most people don't know that. People know that we lost 6,700 brave women in Iraq
and Afghanistan. They don't know that 500,000 came home with post traumatic stress disorder
and traumatic brain injury and they don't know what that has done to those individuals
and to their families. Before you go to war, you explore every other option. That would
be the basic tenet of my foreign policy. Ezra Klein: If it came down to it do you think
it is worth it for America to go to war to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?
Bernie Sanders: That's a hypothesis. You're asking me a hypothetical and I surely applaud
what the President has done to prevent us from looking at that option.
Ezra Klein: You won't say if that was the choice whether ...
Bernie Sanders: That is not the choice right now. I've got to examine this proposal. It
just came out the other day and I can't tell you I've read every word of it, I haven't.
What the president has tried to do is to make it certain that we have a verifiable agreement
that prevents Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and I applaud him very, very much.
That's where we are right now and I hope after examining this treaty, I hope and expect that
I can be strongly supportive of it. Ezra Klein: Let me ask you then not a hypothetical
but a retrospective. Should America have intervened to stop the Rwandan genocide?
Bernie Sanders: Yes. Yes, but it's not just America. This
is the damn problem that we face. We are spending more money on the military than the next nine
countries behind us. Where is the UK? Where is France? Germany is the economic powerhouse
in Europe. They provide healthcare to all of their people, they provide free college
education to their kids. You know what? Germany and France and the UK and Scandinavia and
the rest of Europe, all of us have got to work together to prevent those types of genocide
and atrocities and we have to strengthen the United Nations in order to do that.
Ezra Klein: Do you view yourself as a Zionist? Bernie Sanders: A Zionist?
Ezra Klein: A Zionist. Bernie Sanders: What does that mean? Want
to define what the word is? Do I think Israel has the right to exist, yeah I do. Do I believe
that the United States should be playing an evenhanded role in terms of its dealings with
the Palestinian community in Israel? Absolutely I do.
Again, I think that you have volatile regions in the world, the Middle East is one of them,
and the United States has got to work with other countries around the world to fight
for Israel's security and existence at the same time as we fight for a Palestinian state
where the people in that country can enjoy a decent standard of living, which is certainly
not the case right now. My long term hope is that instead of pouring so much military
aid into Israel, into Egypt, we can provide more economic aid to help improve the standard
of living of the people in that area. Ezra Klein: Let me ask you about the economic
side of foreign policy. I think one of the overwhelming background issues, and sometimes
the foreground issue, is whether the economic rise of, particularly, China, but to some
degree India and others, necessarily means a diminishment in American power and sway.
Do you see it as zero sum in that way? Bernie Sanders: No. I should also tell you
when you talk about foreign policy, what you didn't ask me, which may be as important an
issue as any, is the issue of climate change. If you talk to the CIA, if you talk to the
Department of Defense, and I have, what they will tell you is that one of the great security
issues facing this planet is the fact that as we see more and more drought, as poor people
around the world are unable to grow the food they need to survive, you're going to see
migrations of people in international climate. I happen to believe that when you talk about
foreign policy, a the very top of the list is the need for the United States to lead
the world, to work with China, work with Russia, work with India in transforming our energy
system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy. This is
not just a, "Environmental issue," this is also a global national security issue as well.
Ezra Klein: Do you think the international capacity and relationships exist to price
carbon in a verifiable way? Bernie Sanders: Yeah, I do, and we've introduced
legislation to do that. Look, I happen to agree with Pope Francis
and with virtually all of the scientific community. I'm a member of both the Energy Committee
and the Environmental Committee. I listen to what the scientists say not only in America
but around the world and that is climate change is real, it's caused by human activity, look
at California, it is already causing devastating problems. Not just in the United States, look
at Pakistan – heat waves. It is an international crisis and I have to
tell you, without being overtly political here, it is an embarrassment to me that we
have a major political party called the Republican Party, which with few exceptions refuses to
even recognize the reality of climate change, let alone is prepared to do anything about
it. That is an embarrassment. That you have a major party refusing to listen to science.
Ezra Klein: Do you believe we need to price carbon?
Bernie Sanders: Yes. Ezra Klein: Would you do it through a carbon
tax or cap and trade? Bernie Sanders: Carbon tax.
Ezra Klein: Why? Bernie Sanders: I've introduced legislation.
It's the simple and direct way to do it and I've introduced legislation with Senator Boxer
to do just that. It is the simplest and clearest way. Once you're into cap and trade you're
into all kinds of complicated stuff. Folks on Wall Street are going to make a whole lot
of money. Look, we have got to come up and answer a
simple question. Are the scientists right or are they wrong? If they are right they're
telling us that the planet earth will be 5 to 10 degrees warmer by the end of this century
Fahrenheit. That will cause cataclysmic changes in terms of drought, weather disturbances,
rising sea levels, acidification of the ocean, international conflict. If they are right,
I believe they are right, we have got to move in a very, very bold way. We have to do it
yesterday. Ezra Klein: Then that goes a little bit to
the question of China India. What do you say to countries that look at us and say, "Well,
you got rich off of cheap energy, now you're telling us we can't?"
Bernie Sanders: That's a fair point and a good question. Let's understand that the United
States could do everything right. We could transform our energy system tomorrow to significantly
cut back on carbon. And yet if other countries are producing enormous amounts of carbon,
the game is lost. It has to be a global commitment. It's not an accident that people in China
are wearing surgical masks when they walk the streets, and their water systems are being
destroyed. They have major, major, major environmental problems. I think the role that we can play
with our scientific community is to work with these countries and talk about a win-win proposition.
Can solar actually be cheaper than the more mature forms of energy, coal, oil? I believe
it can. Wind as well. But we have got to start investing in the kinds of technologies which
are useful not only in America but work with China, work with Russia, work with India.
These countries need energy. There's no question about it. No one should go to them and say
you've got to cut your energy in half. What we should be able to say to them, "We're going
to work with you to transform your energy system to make sure you have the energy you
need to maintain a strong economy," but it is not in India's advantage, China's advantage,
to destroy this planet. Nobody gains from that and I think many of them understand that.
Ezra Klein: Do you think that the way Americans view China's rise in economic development
is accurate or misguided? I mean particularly there to go back to the question whether it
is a zero-sum competition between us for influence? Bernie Sanders: I think what the average American
sees is that for many decades now, what corporate America has said is, "Hey, I'm not going to
pay you 20 or 25 bucks at a factory, I don't need you anymore. We're going to shut your
factory down. I'm going to move to China, pay people there a buck or two an hour. I
don't have to worry about environmental regulations, I don't have to worry about unions and I'm
going to produce products there and I'm going to bring them back to the United States of
America.” Now is that the fault of China? No. That issue has to do with the greed of
corporate America who sold out American workers and essentially moved manufacturing to China
and other low wage countries. Are Americans concerned about that, are they
concerned when they walk in a department store and product after product after product is
not made in the United States but is made in China, are they concerned about it? Yeah,
they are. So am I, as a matter of fact. Does that mean that we have to make China into
an enemy? Absolutely not. What we need is a trade policy in this country, among other
things, that works for the American worker rather than the CEOs of large corporations.
I voted against [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] with China, that was the right vote and if
elected President I will radically transform trade policies.
Ezra Klein: If I were Chinese, though, that would sound very zero sum to me because those
factories have been part of the tremendous rise in living standards there.
Bernie Sanders: That's great but you know what? At the same
time the living standards of the American people have gone down. As I indicated to you
earlier I am an internationalist. I want to see poor people around the world, see their
standard of living increase, but you talk about zero sum. I don't think you have to
do it. A lot of people tell me this. Oh yes, the American worker's going to have to become
poorer so we can help poor people in China. I don't believe that for a second.
I want to see the people in China live in a democratic society with a higher standard
of living. I want to see that but I don't think that has to take place at the expense
of the American worker. I don't think decent paying jobs in this country have got to be
lost as companies shut down here and move to China. I think we can work with China,
I want to see American workers maintain a strong ... I want to see the middle class
expand not shrink, I want to see the Chinese people do as well but I do not want to see
the collapse of the American middle class take place and I will fight against that as
hard as I can. Ezra Klein: To go to another continent, do
you think the Euro was a mistake? Bernie Sanders: That's a very good question,
I can't give you a definitive answer right now. I am concerned – I will tell you this
– of what's happening in Greece. I am very concerned that the Germans have led an effort
to squeeze blood from the stone. The Greek economy has contracted by about 25% over the
last 5 years, unemployment is 26%, youth unemployment somewhere around 60% and the idea that Germany
and European banks are pushing more austerity on the Greek people I think is not only a
terrible economic mistake, it's a political mistake and I'll tell you why.
The third largest party in Greece is the party called, "Golden Dawn," you know who they are?
They're a Nazi party. Not even neos. These are real Nazis. If you remember what happened
in 1932 in Germany when you had hyperinflation, when you had an economy that was in a terrible
depression, that's the kind of climate that a Hitler could come to power in. I think that
the European community has got to work with Greece to create economic growth, deal with
unemployment, create an economy so that they can, over a period of years, pay back their
debt, but you cannot keep squeezing that country, so I have concerns about that.
Ezra Klein: Let me end on a question about a policy that is is getting, seems to be some
momentum but it's not often talked about in Washington, which is a universal basic income.
You've begun to have people go back to both Milton Friedman and Martin Luther King Jr.,
saying we should really have a fundamentally guaranteed standard of living in this country.
Bernie Sanders: I am absolutely sympathetic to that approach. That's why I'm fighting
for a $15 minimum wage, why I'm fighting to make sure that everybody in this country gets
the nutrition they need, why I'm fighting to expand Social Security benefits and not
cut them, making sure that every kid in this country regardless of income can go to college,
but that''s what a civilized nation does. What a civilized nation does.
Here's the point. This is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but nobody in
America knows it because their standard of living is going down and almost all of the
new wealth is going to the top 1%. That is an issue that we have to deal with.
In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, top 1/10th of 1% should not own
almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Everybody in this country should in fact have at least
a minimum and dignified standard of living. All right?