Like Paine, Sanders is aware that something is terribly wrong when the wealthiest and most advanced nation in the world harbors dire pockets of poverty.
Like Paine who drew attention to the numbers of poor youth sent to the gallows, Sanders knows it’s terribly wrong when “51 percent of African American high school graduates between the ages of 17 and 20 are unemployed or underemployed” and that “the United States has more people in jail than China; a communist authoritarian country.”
Like Paine, Sanders knows that our system of taxation is anything but fair or equitable as the wealthiest pay the least proportion of taxes compared to those in the middle classes.
It is time to feel the “democratic impulse and aspiration that he [Paine] inscribed in American experience,” to use Harvey Kaye’s words from his wonderful Thomas Paine and the Promise of America.
At www.laprogressive.com
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