The reality is (as Bernie noted) the manufacturing base in the US was offshored to China, India, Vietnam or wherever they could find slave labor. Now a lot of service sector jobs like call centers are done the same. The result is a huge increase in corporate profits which has led to increased stock prices. Wonderful right? I own Apple and Nike in my index fund too. Except what I and the other 99% own is a drop in the bucket compared to what the top 1% owns of equities. The other result is that our hollowed out middle class has very little blue collar jobs left. So we have white collar must have a degree and college debt jobs and service sector can’t afford to purchase a house jobs. A more balanced approach is what we used to have in the good old days that everyone pines for when you could work at a factory, buy a house, take a vacation yearly and have a pension. That’s not coming back. Solution? We have to take back what was lost. The 1% has their wealth because of stock market gains. You either tax them or figure out a way to tax corporate profits. Take that money and recreate the jobs that were offshored. In other words create a second WPA to rebuild infrastructure that creates real blue collar jobs and benefits everyone. That was basically the idea of BBB plan.
He absolutely cares. And his ideas are terrible. The problem he speaks of is not a Covid-specific or Ukraine-specific problem. Why not actually fix the tax code in the long term to fix whatever issues he's concerned about instead of a bizarre 3-year windfall profits tax, which likely can be scammed since it's pretty easy to shift profits by a few years.
