The economist says Sanders is the only candidate who's willing to tax the rich.
02/16/2016 06:33 pm ET
|
Updated
2 days ago
Bernie Sanders is the great hope for America's economic future, according to French economist Thomas Piketty.
In his latest weekly column, Piketty wrote that the Vermont senator's
campaign represents a turning point in the country. "[W]e are
witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the
victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections," he wrote in a piece
that appeared in French in
Le Monde earlier this week and in English in the
Guardian on Tuesday.
The French rockstar economist is the author of
Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
which showed that global income inequality has gotten much, much worse
in the 36 years since Ronald Reagan was first elected. Piketty's life's
work is about showing how
low tax rates
on the rich, particularly in the United States, exacerbate inequality
for those of us below the top 1 percent, or even 0.1 percent, of
earners.
In that sense, Piketty has a bone to pick with the U.S. government,
and anyone who represents its economic policy over the last three
decades. It is through this lens that Piketty looks at the current
presidential race and sees Sanders as the hope for "a new political
cycle":
Sanders makes clear he wants to restore progressive taxation and a
higher minimum wage ($15 an hour). To this he adds free healthcare and
higher education in a country where inequality in access to education
has reached unprecedented heights, highlighting a gulf standing between
the lives of most Americans, and the soothing meritocratic speeches
pronounced by the winners of the system.
Piketty dislikes the Republicans as a group: The "party sinks into a
hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam discourse ... and a
limitless glorification of the fortune amassed by rich white people," he
wrote.
But he has almost as much disdain for Clinton based on her
connections to the establishment, since even under Democratic presidents
(Bill) Clinton and Barack Obama, Reagan's low tax rates continued.
"Hillary Clinton, who fought to the left of Barack Obama in 2008 on
topics such as health insurance, appears today as if she is defending
the status quo, just another heiress of the Reagan-Clinton-Obama
political regime," Piketty writes.
The Clinton of 2016, for the record, may be more moderate than Sanders, but is running substantially
to the left of her 2008 campaign.
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