It was his fanbase, after all, that pushed his income up. They were the ones buying his book.

If they see it as an issue, it's more of an issue than what many people here that are trying to minimize it want you to believe.

Will it change the minds of the "true believers" ... probably not. But it could be an issue for those he's trying to convince to join the BS train.

I don't see their piece as harshly as you wish.

The video speaks for itself. BS used to call out "millionaires" like they were evil, until he became one himself.

Primary season.

Look at the top of the Page.. "Democratic Primaries".. We're gearing up for the 2020 election.

It's code for... "You're winning this argument on the merits and I've got nothing so I'm just gonna throw out this non sequitur in the hopes that you back off."

That's how it seems to me anyway.

Pretty sure this year is 2019.

I will check my calendar again, yet...oh, wait! It is!@@!

....of his speaking appearances over the last year or two.

At most if not all, anyone buying a ticket would get a free book. By law the organizers are prohibited from paying him for his speaking appearances, but they're not prohibited from buying his books (and indirectly "paying" the speaking fee via book royalties)

I can tell you that is any other Senator in the primary did that, Bernie's fans are going to dig it up and pound them. But Bernie doing it somehow is pure, since he was speaking to give a message that would save us all if we were just smart enough to heed it.

Is responsible for more than all of Bernie's money...

Kind of false equivalency there...


I think it is grand the Clintons made money on their books.

But never mind, dear.

I'm reminded of how the Scientologists were caught buying in bulk from key bookstores and wholesalers. These outlets were the ones who reported their sales figures to the NYT. Based on sales data from these "key" stores and distributors, the NYT editors were able to calculate which titles were selling well nationally... IN THEORY.

Unfortunately, this shortcut method can be easily manipulated by anyone who knows which stores and distributors to target. By inflating the sales at just a FEW of the key data sources, it could be made to appear as though a title ("Dianetics" for example) was more popular than it actually was.

I'm not saying that's what's happening here... it's just that the "bulk purchases" of Bernie's book just reminded of that practice, that's all.

I've got to say I'm disgusted with every single Democrat having to apologize for any personal wealth they have been able to amass.

Because we Dems can't seem to win - AOC was ridiculed because she couldn't afford a couple of business suits when first elected, and at the same time Bernie is being criticized because he's now worth a lousy $3 million? In today's dollars that's barely enough to retire on and remain comfortable.

In the meantime we have Trump literally pissing away our Republic, ripping it to shreds institution by institution.

And Bernie is somehow bad because he's become a millionaire???

Please.

....those who have spent years and years bashing "millionaires" all the while he was one is a bit difficult to accept.

We'll see on Monday, this may be why he's been dragging his feet for three years on releasing his tax returns.

He did say BEFORE Monday, but in 4 and a half hours, the BEFORE part will be history and so far no tax returns. Maybe the Bernie camp is furiously dotting the last of those i's and crossing the last of those t's. Or on Monday we get another date for the release, something like the very precise SOON.

he's got nearly 24 hours left, Pacific Time. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

My guess is the returns won't be posted before Monday and on Monday, there will be another reason why.

Which one do you thing has the greatest likelihood of happening?

On Edit ... of course the 4th option is ... Never

This never happened.

"There is something profoundly wrong when we have a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages."

~ Sen. Bernie Sanders

Now he only talks about "the billionaire class."

Go figure.

That's NOT bashing millionaires... that's bashing a financially unfair system that creates inequality in terms of the treatment different classes of wage earners receive. Thank you for making my point!!


Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

Just "the BILLIONAIRE CLASS."

No surprise there...

Notice it used to be millionaires and billionaires, but a year or two he dropped "millionaires". Wonder why?

"There is something profoundly wrong when we have a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages."

~ Sen. Bernie Sanders

Now he just talks about billioniares.

as you certainly know.

of them and puts them in the same category as billionaires.

He no longer includes millionaires in the same category as billionaires. He only talks about "the BILLIONAIRE class as being "profoundly wrong" in their proliferation now.

As you clearly know.

"There is something profoundly wrong when we have a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages."

~ Sen. Bernie Sanders


Since becoming a millionaire, he has changed that rhetoric to talking about "the Billionaire class."

The changes in his message since becoming a millionaire what's being discussed here, not the jump in his income.

Is that clearer?

Before he became one:

"There is something profoundly wrong when we have a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages."

"We`re not going to let the United States continue to have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty in the industrialized world in - at a time when we're seeing a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires."

Now he talks only about "the billionaire class."

No? Then what is the problem? Bernie is against rigging the system so that the wealthy perpetuate their wealth especially at the expense of others. No one remotely mainstream is against writing a book and selling it.

All that time he bashed people like him, many millionaires due to hard work or simple good fortune, many decent people. It is not that Bernie is rich that is insulting, it's the level of lack of disclosure that he has seemingly done to avoid letting people know that.

A lot of people that have bashed officeholders over using the office that voters gave them to enrich themselves are falling over themselves to defend Bernie. A lot of already well off authors have given the money from book sales all to charity, why didn't Bernie do that since he likely was already a millionaire AND he is set to draw a Congressional pension of around $75,000 per year for the rest of his life. We have rich people living where I live, I know that directly, but I can tell you that for the other citizens of my county, a $75,000 annual salary for life is walking in tall cotton.

Another point. Try contacting a literary agent and asking that person whether he or she will represent you to book publishers. You will be told that unless you are a college friend, or family, or a well known politician, or a celebrity or already massively rich and well known, they have zero interest in you. Or better yet, try sending a manuscript to a publisher, if you can even find a way to do that (most stop taking manuscript submissions by unknown writers years ago), your manuscript will get read only if a person foraging for food in a dumpster find it. So NO, HELL NO, Bernie was not some John Doe writer that struck the bigtime and you should not dismiss concerns about him by saying "any writer" because any writer has a better chance of getting struck by three lightening bolts over three days that they have of having a well known publisher pay them royalties for their book.

He only got published because he is well know and he didn’t give away all the proceeds to charity? We are all free to try and embark on a 40 year career that will attain for us that level of fame and I don’t believe Senator Sanders has ever suggested people should give all their surplus money to charity.

I think people are trying very hard to twist themselves into a pretzel to find hypocrisy. I have long though Democrats are way to concerned about hypocrisy. If hypocrisy was an issue for American voters, there would be only a handful of elected Republicans nationwide. That is obviously not the case.

My concern is him bashing rich people, many who honestly earned their money. He sets himself off as a saint, yet when he gets the chance, he does exactly what he criticized.

I have no problem with a heart surgeon or LeBron James making a lot of money and paying the prescribed taxes on it. I think any talk of raising tax rates misses the mark. The real problem is tax avoidance and special rates and deductions for crooked business people and hedge fund managers etc that make lots of money but pay little in taxes. No matter what the tax rate is for someone like Trump, they’re not going to pay anything because of accounting gymnastics. And even worse is when their campaign contributions lead to laws that leave an unlevel playing field that perpetuates their wealth. I think Senator Sanders would say the same but I guess I can’t say for sure. I wish the Dems would articulate this better.

Bill and Hillary's millions earned on their book sales made them "suspect."

For the Clinton book. The much bigger problem was the paid speeches to banks.

Funny how some are twisting themselves into pretzels to make Bernie's money beyond pure. Yet, he did the very same thing Bill and Hillary did.

But I can’t speak for everyone.

"Group A and Group B are bad."
(Then I become part of Group A)
"Group B is bad."

Pretty funny.

I think what that means is that it never was innately bad to be a millionaire or billionaire, in the first place. What matters is their behavior, how they try to wield their power (money is power), and whether they pay their fair share. There's probably a higher percentage of them who are greedy and not good people, because of what drives them, but there are plenty who are good people who inherited wealth or became rich through their own efforts.

A lot of celebrities are filthy rich. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and his wife seem to be good people. They have a philanthropic group with other billionaires who are giving large parts of their wealth to the Gates Foundation to benefit the world. There's also George Soros.

Oligarchies are bad, though. That may be what Sanders is driving at. But that's big corporations and some billionaires and maybe some multi-millionaires, but not all of them.

It's too strange to say it for so many years and then stop, as if he feels guilty or something. Everybody knows who he's talking about -- it's the Koch brothers and those nutty libertarian and Republican industrialists paying for all those think tanks writing legislature and voter suppression and gerrymandering plans for Republicans and for the massive right-wing media empire scaring people out of their wits about the liberals. Maybe he should be more specific and there wouldn't be any confusion.

It must make him nervous, though, because he keeps telling us that money corrupts everybody, that it's impossible to benefit from PACs and money from donors without being corrupted, even though obviously President Obama and many others did.

BS has made a career out of bashing the "millionaires and billionaires" out there. To pretend otherwise just shows a complete lack of credibility.

There are other, honest ways of defending BS, but to ignore reality is just disingenuous.

Churning out infomercials

whenever he talks about them, he's talking about how the government favors them.

"There is something profoundly wrong when we have a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages."

~ Sen. Bernie Sanders

The "true believers" won't see it. I guess it's easier to delude yourself that he's never railed against the wealthy, then to try and come up with a coherent argument why this isn't a problem for BS.

Link to tweet

have not been released up to "soon." We have no idea what they will show, but this initiative to get ThinkProgress to stop talking about his current income level could relate to those old tax returns, as well.

What if Bernie has been a "millionaire" for some time? What then?

As I said in another thread about millionaires, I don't think that's all that much money any more, really. It's not what it used to be. Back in 1974, for example, I bought a little house in a bayside community in California for $20,000. In 2004, I sold it for $357,000. In thirty years, its value had risen as the value of the dollar had dropped. Dramatically. The house was the same little 750 sq. foot. beach cabin, but it was worth over a third of a million dollars when I sold it.

$1,000,000 is not what it once was. when I graduated from high school in 1963, my dream was to have a job as an electronics engineer, earning as much as $12,000 per year. That sounds silly, today, but it's not. I thought I'd be able to retire if I had $100,000 saved up. that was silly, too. Today, even $1 million might not be enough, depending on your lifestyle.

So, maybe Bernie is worth way more than his followers are. What will their reaction be if that's true? I think that's the reason Bernie doesn't really want his tax filings out there.

Maybe we'll find out.

"...some animals are more equal than others."

Link to tweet

And then campaigns on abolishing it.

So he used CAP instead as the bad guy in a fundraiser, even though he spoke highly of them last May at their conference...

Then scrubs the transcript of his speech off his FB page...

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Always know your sources. If you agree with their...point of view, fine. But always know who they are.

https://www.thenation.com/article/secret-donors-behind-center-american-progress-and-other-think-tanks-updated-524/

Scrap the income cap on Social Security payroll taxes through the Social Security Expansion Act so that millionaires and billionaires pay more into the system.

https://www.berniesanders.com/issues/demand-that-the-wealthy-large-corporations-and-wall-street-pay-their-fair-share-in-taxes/