It is hard to be a Trump supporter these days.

In the beginning, sure, voting for Trump seemed to make a lot of sense. Life had been tough for the last several years leading up to the 2016 election, and neither the incompetent Democrats nor your beloved Republican Party had really done anything to help you. So what were you supposed to do? A change was necessary. You needed an outsider. A bad boy. A scrappy underdog who wouldn’t be cowed by all the corrupt billionaires that have spent the last few decades buying the loyalty of our politicians – to the point that the politicians now only protect the interests of those self-same billionaires, corporate lobbyists, and special interest mutli-mega-pacs, while the rest of us normal citizens are left forgotten and ignored. So who better to change up the stagnant political landscape, than another corrupt billionaire? When Trump was elected president, you were no longer ignored and forgotten. Oh no, your message was heard, loud and clear across the world! Greedy, self-serving, uncompassionate, elite, out-of-touch, corrupt politicians may have been ruining this country, but now you had a greedy, self-serving, uncompassionate, elite, out-of-touch, corrupt politician of your very own, so naturally the country was saved. Things would finally be done differently. And oh boy have things been done differently.

For a while, that was enough. The establishment had been shaken, and business as usual was no longer possible. You considered that an undeniable win, even if it was never very clear exactly what Mr. Trump would do to benefit you specifically.

But then, concerns began to surface.

Sure, it’s not completely essential to have an educated, articulate President who speaks in a calm, collected, well-informed manner. But you’ve surely become  at least somewhat uncomfortable with our elected leader’s habit of speaking in rambling, incoherent, coked-out diatribes, and cranking out crackpot tweets riddled with spelling errors and gross inaccuracies while sitting on the shitter at 2am.

And no, of course the President doesn’t need to be kind all of the time, but you couldn’t help but think that making fun of a war hero, or a physically disabled reporter, or bullying a mentally disabled child might not be an appropriate way for the most powerful man in the world to act.

And sure, it’s hard to reconcile the traditional family values your preferred party so loudly promotes with the ugly reality of a misogynistic lecher who has had multiple divorces, received multiple accusations of predatory sexual behavior, and paid hush money to hide an extra-marital affair with a porn star while his wife was pregnant with his child, but nobody is perfect after all.

But then there was also that thing where he stole from and had to pay a $2 million dollar fine to 8 different charities? That definitely was not cool.

And also that thing where he created a fake Real Estate University, and had to pay a $25 million dollar lawsuit to victims of his sham.

Plus, it’s not really cool how he has already spent over 300 years worth of presidential salary playing golf at his Florida resort, where all the rooms he is renting out to his various staff and security are being charged at full price, rooms which are being paid for by the American taxpayer, and profits from which are funneling directly into his own pocket.

Additionally, it is frustrating how he claimed he would “drain the swamp,” but all the career politicians are still firmly entrenched in their cushy elected roles, and the only people being fired, or quitting, and oftentimes going on to be tried and convicted of crimes to an alarming degree, seem to be people he hired to begin with.

Oh, and also, he was impeached. Sure, he was acquitted in his senate trial, but you’re understandably concerned with the fact that the judge of the trial admitted that he would not be impartial before the trial even began, and they blocked all the witnesses from testifying before the senate, and hid evidence, and took almost no time to deliberate before voting exclusively along party lines, except for one devout Republican who considered his oath before God to tell the truth to be more important than the orders he received from his political party to lie, and then, as soon as President Trump was acquitted he illegally retaliated by firing all of the witnesses and openly admitted to doing the very thing he was on trial for, almost as if to gloat about his invulnerability, like a sociopathic serial killer.

So yes, it must be hard to be a Trump supporter these days. You wanted a loose cannon to shake things up on Capital hill, and you got it, but the problem with a loose cannon is it tends to cause destruction all over the place, not just where you’ve pointed it.

There comes a point where it’s just too exhausting to keep up your support for a man that ticks all the boxes necessary to be the villain of a 1980’s coming-of-age teen movie. Privileged Country club jock? Check. Documented coward? Check. Irredeemable bully to anybody weaker or poorer? Check. Problematic views and actions towards women? Check. More concerned with looking good and maintaining his social standing than doing what is right, just, or fair? Definitely check.

So what is a frustrated Trump supporter to do? You’re still disgusted with the established political system. You still want to root for an outsider. A bad boy. A scrappy underdog who won’t be cowed  by all the corrupt billionaires and their purchased politicians. Luckily, there is another option! You can still stick it to the man, without continuing to support a cruel and deranged lunatic constantly mired in scandal.

I submit to you: Bernie Sanders.

I know your initial knee-jerk reaction is OH NO, HE’S A SOCIALIST, and worse he’s a DEMOCRAT, but allow me to explain. First, technically he’s an independent, who just happens to be campaigning in the Democratic primaries. Second, I know that socialism is a dirty word, but we already have plenty of socialist programs in the United States, like Social Security, Medicare, SNAP food stamps and other social welfare programs, and Labor Unions whose efforts earned us the 40 hour work week, and overtime pay, and minimum wage. Without them we’d likely still all be slinging pig shit barefoot in a tannery for 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for six cents an hour and a diet Mr. Pibb. It’s no coincidence that America’s economy was doing the best, and America’s middle class was at it’s strongest when Labor Unions were also at their strongest. And what’s wrong with social welfare nets? Do you really hate the poorest and most vulnerable among us so much that you’d rather not pay the $80 per year that Welfare costs? Surely you agree that $80 is a low price to pay to know that an innocent child might not starve to death because their family is going through a tough situation. Plus I’m sure you’re not going to complain about receiving those Social Security checks and Medicare benefits you collect upon retirement. Besides, we already pay tax-payer funded subsidies to enormously wealthy corporations as bailouts, so why is it okay to use socialist policies on the rich and powerful, but not us regular folk? Maybe a certain limited level of democratic socialism isn’t such a terrible fate after all. Besides, Bernie Sanders is not even exactly a socialist in the traditional sense of the word, he’s not interested in seizing the means of production and abolishing private ownership. He simply wants to adopt some socialist programs that other capitalist countries have successfully implemented, in order to combat inequality and extreme poverty in the United States.

LET ME REITERATE. THE UNITED STATES WILL NEVER BE A SOCIALIST COUNTRY. True authoritarian socialism has never worked, and will never work. Even success stories for full Democratic Socialism are few and far between. The United States is the poster child for democracy and capitalism. We are rich and we are powerful, in no small part due to our successful capitalist innovation and drive. That does not mean that there is not vast room for improvement in the way we support and protect our most vulnerable classes.

SO I’LL SAY IT AGAIN. THE UNITED STATES WILL NEVER BE A SOCIALIST COUNTRY. PURE SOCIALISM DOES NOT WORK. WHAT DOES WORK HOWEVER, ARE ADOPTING SOCIALIST POLICIES INTO A DEMOCRATIC CAPITALIST SOCIETY TO HELP PROTECT THE WORKING CLASS.

This DOES WORK. Countries that have successfully adopted varying levels of socialist policies include Bolivia (which has drastically cut extreme poverty and has the highest GDP growth rate in South America), Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand.

When you think about failed socialist states, and poverty stricken hellholes, do any of those countries come to mind? No they do not. All of those beautiful countries, countries whose citizens consistently rank happier than citizens from the United States, succeed in no small part due to the robust social welfare systems they have in place that promote equality and protect their citizens when things go wrong.

So let me repeat yet again – Bernie is not in any way going to remove the ownership of businesses and properties from private hands. What he will do, is continue to fight for the rights of the common working man. You know, men like all of us. And you’ve got to give the old bastard his due, he’s been in this fight his entire life. He’s dedicated his entire career to civil service on behalf of the American people. If that’s not enough to convince you to vote for Bernie, just wait, there’s more!

Look, I know you HATE Democrats. You probably post snappy political memes on Facebook all day that claim Democrats are Stupid, and Un-American, and Lazy, and Greedy, and Brown. But…I’m a Democrat. For those of you who know me personally, is that what you really think of me? When you think of someone who is stupid, or un-American, or lazy, or greedy, or brown, is it really me that pops into your head?  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it isn’t. That would be like me thinking you are the stereotypical villainous Republican – Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Hateful, Cruel, Hypocritical, Uneducated, Misinformed, Greedy, and unempathetic. But here’s the thing, you’re my friends and I know you aren’t those things, even if that’s what the Facebook memes say. So maybe, just maybe, Democrats aren’t the cartoonish super-villains you seem to think they are either.

Even if you can’t be convinced otherwise, and you’re sure that all Democrats, including me, are evil traitors, you should still consider voting for Bernie Sanders, because you see, the Do Nothing Democrats hate him too. You know the old saying – the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Establishment Democrats, just like the Establishment Republicans, are all bought and paid for by those rascally billionaires, corporations, and pacs. Except for Bernie. Bernie Sanders, unlike the mainstream Democrats, and unlike Mr. Trump, refuses to accept money from billionaires and special interest groups, and is running his entire grassroots campaign entirely off of small donations from regular American citizens. That means if he gets elected, he’ll continue to fight for our best interests because he won’t have been bribed to act otherwise. Because of this, the DNC is really scrambling to stomp out his message, but despite their best efforts, his support keeps growing and growing. So while the DNC would love to see one of their billionaire-butt-licking puppet stooges like Buttigieg, Warren, or Biden take the reins, and their fake news network spin doctors are doing their best to suppress or explain away Sanders’ popularity, Bernie’s star keeps rising because he, like Trump, represents the normal, real American people’s frustration with the current corrupted system. In most cases, the narrative manipulation by the fake news media isn’t even subtle, it’s blatantly obvious, like this recent article with the headline AI picks Buttigieg ‘the candidate to beat Trump’, where if you actually look past the headline at the actual forecast, Buttigieg is actually in a distant second place with 17.9 percent, while Bernie wins handily with 24.9 percent. Saying the AI picked Buttigieg is a blatant lie.

The #Bernieblackout is real folks, here’s another example of mainstream media simply ignoring Bernie’s surging popularity, and refusing to mention his name even though he won the New Hampshire primary:

As a Trump supporter, you know all about the frustrating spin created by the fake news media. So I’m sure you can empathize with Bernie Sanders and his supporters, who are getting shut out and silenced, bigly. (Be careful though, the left leaning news outlets are not alone in spreading misinformation and fake news. In fact, a rigorous study conducted by Fairleigh University found that watching Fox news actually made you less informed than watching No News At All. So if you’re relying exclusively on Fox for your news…don’t. It turns out it’s the fakest news of all.)

Beyond the cathartic knowledge that voting for Bernie Sanders will be thumbing your nose at the DNC elites and the fake news media, there are actual, tangible benefits to supporting our favorite grumpy old Jew from Vermont.

Let’s talk about the economy. Trump is the first to toot his own horn when it comes to, well, anything, but especially the “economy”, specifically how well the stock market is doing, and how low the unemployment rate is. But what does that really mean for us normal people? The truth is, it doesn’t mean much. A booming stock market benefits…people with stocks, and that for the most part means wealthy people. So while the stock market soars, and the rich get richer, those of us who need to work for a paycheck, and then spend our paychecks on things like food and shelter, and can’t afford to invest heavily, are left falling further and further behind. Without regulation, a capitalist system is all about maximizing profit. This usually comes at the expense of us normal wage earners. Don’t forget, slavery is capitalist. Child-labor is capitalist. Unchecked Capitalism can be just as dangerous as unchecked communism, or fascism, or socialism. Always remember, while business owners enjoy increased dividends on their stock options, their increased profits oftentimes actually come from demanding more and more from their workers, and giving them less and less. In a perfect system, companies would provide great benefits and pay strong wages to their workers, since all their profit is built off of the efforts of their work force, and they want to take care of their people. In the real world however, what is actually happening is unmitigated greed is causing companies to pay their workers less than a living wage, while demanding ever increasing levels of productivity, while those at the top get richer and richer in a single-minded hunger for more profits.

Look at this census data. It shows how income has remained stagnant for all levels of earners for over fifty years, except the rich. They’re doing just fine. Thanks to President Trump’s tax breaks for the rich, the very people who need the tax breaks the least are making even more money than ever before, while those of us who would benefit the most from a break are once again forgotten, so not only has our national debt skyrocketed, but the income inequality level has grown ever wider.

Take the company I work for, for example. It’s a great company, and I like working there. It’s also a fairly big company, with 16,400 employees. Last year, the top-five highest paid members of the board of directors made over 34,000,000 dollars. Between the five of them, they could have given an additional $2,000 to every single one of their sixteen thousand four hundred employees, and still walked away with an entirely respectable wage of $240,000 each, more than enough to support a family in comfort and style. These top five board members did not express their gratitude toward their hard working employees with $2000 bonus checks however. Instead, they notified us that they won’t be giving out raises this year, and we might be in danger of downsizing to cut expenses. They made 34 million dollars, could stop working tomorrow and still live their entire remaining lives in obscene luxury, and they’re threatening to lay off people barely making 34 thousand dollars a year. And this is from a great company that for the most part takes care of its workers, not even a dystopian hellhole like Walmart or Amazon where the lowest earners rely on government welfare to survive while their owners are literally the richest human beings that have ever existed throughout all time. But hey, at least the stock market is up, right?

Added on top of this gross income inequality, we have skyrocketing costs of living. Trump is so very proud of the low unemployment rate, and even ignoring the fact that the economy was already rebounding strongly long before he ever entered office, and he personally isn’t responsible for the low unemployment numbers at all, the sad fact of the matter is that being employed does not mean you aren’t living in poverty. Take a look at this graphic –

From the 1960s to today, you can see the steady climb in median home price in the United States, a reasonable indicator for overall cost of living. Now remember that previous graphic I posted earlier, that shows income remaining steady and in some places going down from the 1960s until today? Yeah, you can see the issue. Everything is getting more and more expensive, but we are not getting paid more. So what gives?

Bernie Sanders has made it a campaign promise to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. In 1965 it was $1.25, or $10.30 in today equivalent dollars. So from 1965 until now the minimum wage has actually gone down, while cost of living has, as can clearly be seen, gone up, up, up. During that time, GDP, profits, and income for the top few percent has also gone up, up, up, so it’s not like the money isn’t there to support a higher minimum wage, it’s just ending up in fewer and fewer pockets, where it does the least good.

Bernie believes, and I wholeheartedly agree, that if you work full time, you should be able to support yourself. The minimum wage should actually reflect the lowest amount needed to legitimately survive. If you’re getting paid less than that, your employer is saying that the value of your labor is so low, that you don’t even deserve to live. That is wrong. If your argument against raising the minimum wage is that you currently make $15 an hour doing something higher skilled than what traditional minimum wage employment looks like…you’re an idiot. Or cruel. Instead of saying, hey, I deserve to be compensated higher for my skilled labor, which is true, you do, you’re saying hey, I don’t care if someone else’s income won’t allow them to live a dignified, successful life, as long as I’m doing better than them, which is wrong. Here’s the thing! You BOTH deserve to be compensated higher for your labor. If minimum wage is $15/hr, and you currently make $15/hr doing some sort of highly skilled job, YOUR INCOME WILL BE RAISED HIGHER TOO. Do you know why? Because you’ll have leverage. If you can make the same income doing something easier, then if your employer doesn’t raise your wage to an appropriate level, you can just leave. Go do the easier job for the same amount of money! You won’t be any worse off, and your employer will still have to fill that harder, more skilled position, something they won’t be able to do without paying at the higher rate it deserves. Since that is the case, it makes financial sense for them to keep you, a trained, proven employee, and pay you that higher rate you’ve earned. Once we have that freedom to leave and still make a living if we are not compensated fairly at our skilled job, we suddenly have the bargaining power again, and we will be able to start closing the ever expanding income inequality gap. Remember, the money is there. Typical CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978, while typical worker compensation has only grown 12%. Why is their labor so much more valuable than ours? If a millionaire gets an extra million dollars,  or a billionaire gets an extra billion dollars, does it really improve their quality of life? No, it does not. It’s just numbers on a ledger at that point. It’s doesn’t really add to the economy. But for someone making $30,000, a few extra thousand dollars a year would absolutely be life changing. That might mean the difference between renting and buying a home. It might mean the difference between taking the bus or buying a car. It might mean the difference between remaining child-free or having a child. What do you think is better for the economy? Hundreds of thousands of people in a resurgent middle class building houses and buying cars and having children, or a few wealthy billionaires hoarding more cash away in some Cayman Island tax haven account?

An increased minimum wage isn’t the only thing that would benefit us normal struggling folk. Bernie Sanders is dedicated to not only increasing our income, but also reducing our expenses. Like I mentioned before, cost of living has gone up steadily since the 1960s, while income has remained steady. In almost no way is that more apparent than the increased costs of education.

The above chart paints a stark picture of the problem. College just keeps getting more and more expensive, while we keep getting less and less capable of paying for it. Bernie Sanders is committed to changing the way our public college and universities do business. A change is needed, because unfortunately higher education is already out of reach for most normal people, at a time when the changing and ever more competitive job market makes those higher education degrees all the more necessary. Gone are the days when a blue collar laborer can hop onto an assembly line at a manufacturing plant and make a comfortable living. Skilled blue collar jobs can’t be the answer for everybody either. Not everybody can go to a trade school and get a high paying job as a welder, or plumber, or electrician. There simply aren’t enough of those jobs available. Most of the jobs which are available are “degree preferred” or “degree required,” even if they’re bullshit, low-paying, basically menial jobs that don’t really even require a degree in practice, since that’s just the way the job market is these days, so most of us have to get college educations in order to support ourselves. So before you make fun of the young people who support Bernie’s student loan forgiveness idea, try to walk a mile in their shoes. I’ll give you an example. It’s me. I’m the example.

I went to a modest public State University, worked hard for four years, and got a useful bachelors degree which eventually helped me find the decent job I have today. I do not have student loans. The only reason I was able to do that was because my father was killed violently while working, and I received compensation to pay for school. My wife, the mighty Wife Kay, also went to that same modest public State University, and received her bachelors degree, and actually makes more than me at her current job. Unfortunately, since she did not have the good fortune of having a parent die messily, and since her inconveniently still alive parents were not in a place financially where they could gift her tens of thousands of dollars, she had to take out student loans to pay for her education. We graduated 12 years ago. She is still paying off those loans, and the interest is so high that most of the principle remains untouched. So for well over a decade, she has been working hard, usually at multiple jobs, over 60 hours a week, and has been paying enough money every single month to cover the mortgage for a decent home toward these loans, and we still have tens of thousands of dollars remaining in debt. That is disgusting. She is the exact opposite of lazy or greedy, and she’s been nearly drowning for over 12 years. Think about if I had loans too. Our lives would be completely different. We would never have been able to purchase our house. We wouldn’t even be close to thinking about having children. We’d be in a position where we’d just be making interest payments on the costs incurred for a pair of bachelor degrees at a modest public university from now until the end of time, and our lives would never really get anywhere. Now imagine if neither of us had student loans. Our lives would be completely different again, this time for the better. We could have bought our house ten years earlier, instead of renting with multiple roommates into our thirties. We could have significant amounts of money saved toward retirement. We could have pumped money into the economy with various additional purchases. We could have had children already. So think about that reality the next time you hear about ideas like Student loan forgiveness. Instead of immediately assuming young people are just lazy and greedy and don’t want to pay their debts, recognize that their lives are actually being ruined, and they sincerely need help. People used to be able to work part time 4 hours a day at minimum wage and pay cash for public college. Now you’d need to work over 20 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year at minimum wage to pay cash for public college. Private colleges are even more expensive. It’s simply impossible to work your way through school without the type of high paying job you can’t expect to obtain without already having degree, so that means for those of us without rich parents, loans have become essential, because the current employment landscape makes college degrees essential. So for the sake of our future students, something needs to change regarding the cost of higher education, and for those recent students whose lives are literally being ruined by their educational loan debt, student loan forgiveness may, without hyperbole, be the only chance they have to ever have a successful, comfortable life where they can pump their income back into the economy, and create growth, instead of just losing it all making interest payments on insurmountable debt.

The third, and to me, the most important thing Bernie Sanders is focused on, is health care. Single-payer healthcare. Universal healthcare. Nationalized medicine. Socialized medicine. Medicare for all. Whatever you want to call it, it, more than anything else, is absolutely essential right now. The truth of the matter is that America’s healthcare system is so broken, that people are dying from preventable illnesses and fixable injuries simply because they can’t afford to fix them, even though we live in the richest, most prosperous, most powerful nation that has ever existed. If you know me, or if you follow this website, you know that one of my closest friends is currently fighting stage IV colon cancer, so this shit is personal for me. She is a young, hard working, otherwise healthy woman, with “good” health insurance, and her treatments are still costing her tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket. Not only does she have to focus on not dying from the cancer, she also has to focus on figuring out if she’ll still have a job after her treatment is complete, and how to pay her bills while she is in treatment. Our current system is barbaric, and most upsettingly, it’s not even necessary. Universal healthcare isn’t some crackpot’s pipe dream. Out of 34 developed nations, 33 have figured it out. The USA is the only one still languishing in the dark ages of for profit medicine. I know most people’s arguments against socialized healthcare, or really any social programs, is cost. They don’t want to pay an extra six cents a year so that tiny Tim Cratchit can get a new crutch and some cough syrup, and live to see another Christmas. But the cost projections pretty definitively show that Medicare for all would actually cost us LESS. Right now we all pay out of pocket for care, or for various private, for profit health insurances. If we had Medicare for all, some more money would be taken out of our paychecks for taxes, yes, BUT we would no longer pay all the money that is taken out of our paychecks for our current health insurance, so the net amount paid out would actually be less. On top of that, a single payer system would actually make the cost of medicine go down EXPONENTIALLY. Our current system is the wild west, an uncontrolled gold rush of profiteering and extortion. Take insulin for example. It’s creator sold the patent for $1, because it was meant to help people. It costs about $5 to create a vial of this live-saving and entirely necessary medication. In the USA, even though it only costs $5 to make, an insulin vial costs us over $500 to receive. That’s a profit margin of nearly 10,000%. That is unquestionably criminal. And it’s not just insulin, these types of price gouging activities are rampant throughout the entire healthcare industry, even for something as simple as say, a cough drop. A regular old cough drop, the type you can buy a bag of at any drug store, costs about $.03 retail. In a hospital, a single cough drop costs $10. Ten dollars for a cough drop. That’s an increase of over THIRTY THREE THOUSAND PERCENT. A single payer healthcare system, which would make the government the sole customer for these various drug manufacturers and healthcare companies helps reduce these criminally inflated healthcare prices by giving us bargaining power. If the government is your sole buyer, you can’t overcharge your one customer, because if you do, they’ll just take their business elsewhere, thus forcing prices to remain competitive.

Another argument people like to make against socialized healthcare is that it forces you to pay into healthcare, even if you do not personally use it, thus taking away your “freedom” to choose whether or not you would like to be covered. Besides being needlessly obtuse, because paying into such a system would likely actually save you money, I argue that you are mistaken. I think it would actually increase our freedom. In our current system, many people are trapped in horrible, underpaying, unfulfilling jobs that they hate, simply because they are afraid to lose their medical benefits. With Medicare For All, you would now have the freedom to leave that terrible job and find something better, because you have the security of knowing that you won’t lose access to healthcare. It will also give us the freedom from being ruined by medical debt. Freedom from bankruptcy and ruined lives just because you slip and break your leg on a patch of ice, or wake up one day with a tumor the size of a cantaloupe protruding from your forehead.

I believe that the cost of such a system would actually be less than healthcare is now. This is based on the fact that person for person, healthcare in the US actually costs about twice as much as it does in the rest of the developed world. If we were getting twice as good care, then maybe that would almost make sense, but we’re not. We’re actually getting worse care. So why are we fighting this?

I know that Republican rhetoric points to individual freedoms as being more important than lumbering government oversight, and I agree wholeheartedly. The problem is, we currently aren’t really even enjoying all that many individual freedoms. We’re instead being taken advantage of by a rigged economy designed to benefit the tiny top richest percent, while the great majority of us are forced to sell our labor for far less than it is worth, pay outrageous prices for the education essential to improve our lot in life, and risk losing it all to a criminally greedy healthcare system if even the slightest thing goes wrong. Social systems cost money, and if Mr. Sanders gets his way and gets all the various protections and coverages he desires, costs would be higher, but there is a relatively untapped resource of nearly immeasurable wealth being wasted by the super rich. It used to be that the richest among us would be taxed at about 70%, which is a large percentage of their income sure, but when your income is that high, the actual impact on your financial well-being is much less noticeable than a person with a normal income being taxed at 30%. Since the rich would be the least impacted by an increased tax rate, I have no problem with our government bumping their tax rate back up to a higher level. I say this even as I hope to one day become one of those rich people myself. If I’m obscenely wealthy and funds I’m not even using because I simply don’t need them are spent on feeding a starving child, or repairing crumbling infrastructure, or paying for a sick young woman’s cancer treatment, I’m okay with that.

President Trump is a very “Me” focused individual. Everything is about him. When things are going well, according to him it’s because of him. When things are going poorly, it’s everybody else’s fault. Mr. Trump’s tagline when he campaigned in 2016 was “I alone can fix America.” Really, Mr. Trump? We didn’t need a King in 1776, and we don’t need one now. You’re either vastly over-confident in your own abilities, or vastly under-estimating the quality of ours. America doesn’t need four more years of such a self-centered individual.

Appropriately, Bernie Sanders’ tagline is – “Not me. Us.”

The main stream media will do everything in its power to obfuscate and conceal Bernie Sanders’ message. So take some time, and look him up yourself. I think you might find what he has to say makes a lot of sense. If you were a Trump supporter, but you’re having second thoughts, I think Bernie might be your man. If you’re a Democrat already, multiple polls pretty clearly show that Bernie has the best change of beating Trump in the general election, so don’t let the DNC shoot themselves in the foot again by promoting another unpopular candidate over Bernie just because he’s not a corporate stooge who will blindly toe the party line.

Everybody, regardless of political affiliation should remember that all of our politicians are elected representatives. Their entire reason for existence is to represent US. If they’re not doing that, if they’re taking the role to gain wealth, power, and recognition for themselves, they’re shitting on everything their positions stand for. That includes whoever is in the presidency. That’s why I believe Bernie, with his long career dedicated to fighting for the common man, is our best choice for the next President of the United States.