Bernie Sanders' Lake House

This topic is about Bernie Sanders, not Donald Trump. That's the most common tactic used by both parties during any discussion. When a valid point is made the automatic defense mechanism is "What about your supporters".

The question is a valid one to ask, turning it around and asking the question back is not an answer to the question.

 

I never compared home prices in the Northeast to rural areas.

Actually where I live his net worth would be roughly the same, housing prices where I am are quite similar to the Northeast. That is besides the point, $2 Million is more wealth than the majority of Americans have regardless of where they live, including the more expensive Northeast.

I literally said this in the original post, he lives in Vermont and works in DC, of course he needs a home in his home state and an apartment in DC. The topic here is the vacation home which yes was acquired via inheritance from his wife apparently. Nothing wrong with that at all, it's their money that they acquired legally and they are free to do with it as they please. My issue is when I hear constant claims of immorality of income inequality from Sanders but he owns a vacation home that is more expensive than the majority of folks can afford to purchase for a primary home regardless of geographic location. That seems inconsistent with the values he stands for.

I never claimed that Bernie became wealthy by exploiting others. From what I understand his money comes from his Senator salary obviously and much of it came from his book sales. All perfectly legal and moral forms of income. As I said before I main focus here is consistency, something is either wrong or it isn't. Bernie could take a portion of his wealth and purchase a gold plated statue of himself and place it in his front yard and I would support him 100% because it's his money and he can do whatever he wants with it. However if someone continuously makes statements such as the wealthy live in mansions while thousands of Americans live on street corners then I find it hard to view that as non hypocritical when the man making the statement himself has a half a million dollar vacation property.

If it is morally "wrong" that the rich have mansions while the poor live in tents then is it not morally wrong that Bernie has a vacation house while poor live in tents also? Or is the "morally wrong" part brought by HOW the very rich earned their wealth? Is the manner by which the likes of Bloomberg, Bezos, Trump, etc earned their massive wealth the underlying "problem"? If so, for those who hold your ideology is there a morally "correct" way that someone can earn millions or billions of dollars or is someone earning billions of dollars in itself morally wrong regardless?

I appreciate the responses and actual discussion. As I said it's difficult to gain insight into varying ideologies because folks tend to get so defensive in todays polarized world.

 

See there we go were getting to the actual discussion and point of this thread now and what I am trying to understand. As I said this world is way too polarized to get any valid information anymore. Everything is tainted with some sort of bias so it's hard to know what is even true or fabricated.

So the "immoral" part from Bernie's perspective is not necessarily wealth itself but rather HOW that wealth is acquired. Which makes sense.

In the eyes of him or his supporters is there a way to "morally" acquire massive wealth? Is there a way for an American to morally have a net worth of a billion dollars or is the fact that anybody has a net worth of a billion dollars immoral in itself regardless? Is there any multimillionaire or billionaire that Bernie supports and believes is morally just in having that wealth?

 

Not in the past few years. He has gradually shifted his tone from "millionaires and billionaires" to mainly just billionaires now. But yes Bernie routinely makes statements that it is immoral and an injustice that billionaires live in luxury while thousands of Americans live on the street. Or have no health insurance, or go broke from unforeseen medical expenses, etc. That or various other statements of similar caliber.

 

I hear what you are saying and I appreciate the thought out response.

I actually think about the "morality" of the rich and powerful quite often and I get what both sides are saying.

For example lets take Jeff Bezos, the man behind Amazon. His net worth is around $130 billion....that's insane. And through multiple loopholes or legal policies or whatever we want to call it Amazon pays no federal taxes. That, on the surface, seems "wrong" and I can certainly understand why so many folks view it as completely wrong. But on the other hand I look and see what Amazon has provided for society. I love Amazon for one, I mean I seriously love Amazon, I think it's the best modern invention since the internet itself. I can click a button and have virtually whatever I want delivered to my doorstep in 2 days without even having to leave my couch. That's an amazing service that I and millions of other Americans LOVE and appreciate. Amazon also employs over 750,000 people worldwide, over 275,000 Americans alone. That's 275,000 jobs for folks in America with benefits including medical, prescription drug, dental and vision and a 50% company match 401k plan. That's pretty good...

So I look at this from both sides of the coin. Yeah Bezos and his corporate partners figured out how to earn over 200 billion dollars in revenue a year and not pay federal taxes. But they also employ a quarter million Americans with jobs and benefits. They started a company to provide a service that millions of Americans LOVE. Those top big shareholders, including Bezos, could withdraw their investments, take their billions and just go home and collapse the company if they so desire.

I hear the counterargument to that all the time in the form of "being happy with the scraps from the table" or something like that. Just because they employ so many people doesn't mean they should be exempt from morality. I get that, but at the same time I think that's a stretch. Yes we've created a system to where the billionaire class has A LOT of power, partly due to the aforementioned reasons. They have enough money to influence law in many cases and they also employ enough people to where the government can threaten them but they can threaten back and then stand there wondering who would blink first. "I don't want to pay more taxes and if you try to close whatever loophole that allows me not to then I'm moving my company overseas and/or closing it down and taking my billions with me. Oh and those 275,000 Americans I employ are now jobless tomorrow. And Americans vote. Your choice". Amazon didn't say that obviously but those are the types of threats that they can make, and plenty of other large corporations have done similar things like that in the past. Yes they are massive and yes they have A LOT of power for reasons like that.

Not to say that I am "afraid" of the "elite class" or advocating folks be content with "scraps from the table" anything like that, I don't work for them. But I do have genuine concerns over how to even address the amount of power they wield without collapsing the entire economy. And I also wonder what is MORE "immoral", these massive corporations who get away with proverbial murder or the government pissing them off and they outsource and hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their livelihood. And I wonder how that would turn out in the real world to the average person. Would the average Amazon employee who has that job to feed his family "understand" why he is being laid off as the government tackles Amazon? Or would the average American employee who has that job to feed his family now be pissed off at the government who pissed off his employer who then outsourced and laid him off? Would the small business owner who needs a new truck for his or her shop who can no longer afford it "understand" because Ford outsourced overseas and the government put tariffs on outsourced Ford imports to combat Ford?

I understand both sides of the argument. But with things like this there are 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc order effects that must be considered as well. Yes the government can punch these big corporations but these big corporations are so big that they can effectively punch right back. And it's the average American worker who is the one actually being hit in the mouth and I'm not exactly sure how many of them would be ok with that, regardless of WHY the government did it.

It's kind of like the very real question that was asked to Bernie Sanders during the debate the other night. You want to outlaw fracking within the next few years. That is a MASSIVE industry in the US and the question asked in regards to Pennsylvania where there are roughly 30,000 workers in that field. When asked what he would say to those people the response was more of less "Scientists say we have no choice or we will do irreparable damage to the planet in the next decade". That may be a factually correct statement or it may be slightly exaggerated, irrelevant. The point is the same as with the mega corporations and the average worker. Will the Pennsylvania worker who works in the natural gas industry to feed his family "understand" that he is now unemployed because we needed to "save the planet"? The bottom line is how many average Americans will "understand" the "big picture" and understand why you are doing what you are doing when they are the ones who are directly eating the grenades?

 

Thanks for the thorough insight. It certainly does give me a much better understanding of the ideology.

A few questions though.

You mentioned corporations exploiting the environment and polluting the air without regard. But aren't We the People equally responsible for that as well? We the consumers are who consume these products, many of which are manufactured via less than ideal processes. A business is in the business to make money and if a business isn't profitable it's not going to continue and without us consumers then a business isn't profitable. I'm not talking about necessities such as food production but luxury items that are so prevalent in America. For example vehicles. In today's age pretty much every other vehicle I see on the road is an SUV or a full sized truck, neither of which are very economical or fuel efficient. Less fuel efficiency means more fuel consumed, more fuel requires more oil. Some folks need full sized trucks for work or home projects or whatnot but A LOT of folks ride around in full sized V8 trucks that never once hauled anything in that bed or even taken it off road. They just have it because they want it. If Chevy Silverado's weren't profitable for Chevy then Chevy wouldn't produce them. Without the private sector there is simply not enough profit to be had in full sized trucks by selling strictly to business fleets so the production line would be discontinued. Same with F-150s, Ram's, etc. It's us who want these items and it's us who buy them from the company. Isn't it just as much our fault for wanting and buying V8 trucks as it is Chevy and Fords fault for making them?

Same with sports cars. There is literally no viable reason why anybody needs a V8 Mustang for any reason whatsoever outside of because they just want one. It serves no requirement in one's life that cannot be better handled by a more economical 4 cylinder Civic or Prius or something like that.

Same with a company like Amazon. Yes Amazon is pretty bad for the environment largely due to their premiere 2 day shipping plan. That requires massive amounts of resources and fossil fuels to have millions of items shipped from warehouses to your front door anywhere in the continental US in 48 hours. That's a result of we the consumers, not only do we want our stuff we want it RIGHT NOW and we can't even be bothered to wait a week or 2 for it to arrive. So now we have Amazon zipping around in freight trucks and loading up FedEx and UPS jets by the metric ton to get our consumer goods to us quickly. Nobody is forced to use Amazon Prime in order to use Amazon but rarely does ANYBODY click the button that says "No rush shipping" when they order an item from there. And since this is the free market in order for Amazon to not completely destroy every other retailer the others had to begin matching Amazon's speedy delivery system in order to retain customers. So now most big businesses have a similar shipping policy including Wal-Mart. So now even more fossil fuels are being used to zip our stuff to us in days instead of weeks. Is that the fault of the corporations or the fault of us? If we would have never signed up for Amazon Prime in the first place then there would be no Amazon Prime.

Americans live a VERY affluent lifestyle as does much of the Western 1st world. I am aware of the correlation between the beef and dairy industries and climate change. But we Americans LOVE our beef and dairy. We don't HAVE to eat like that, the majority of the entire world population doesn't eat like this but it's what we want. There's a Burger King and McDonalds in virtually every town in the US. Nobody HAS to eat McDonalds as their only means of food. Even McDonalds dollar menu deal isn't a good deal in comparison to the amount of food you can get from the grocery store for the price of a few fast food burgers.

My point is, this is just a small part of a VERY LARGE list of luxuries that we Americans want. So is it fair for us to turn our sights on the corporations for polluting the planet in order to give us what we want at the prices we want or are we just as much to blame as they are?

How many Americans are willing to give up their V8 trucks and SUVs to cut back on fossil fuel consumption and pollution? Give up fast food to put a pretty hefty dent in the beef and dairy industry to reduce CO2 emissions? Pay a premium price for fish to reduce global over fishing and the massive amounts of plastic netting polluting our oceans? Stop going on luxury cruise liners which are a huge contributor to ocean pollution? These things exist because we want them to.

If we aren't willing to change our way of life then how can we blame the corporations for destroying the planet in order to provide us our way of life?