Bernie Sanders, the outspoken Vermont senator and self-described Democratic socialist, is not one to shy away from speaking his mind about the ultra-rich. And in a recent video posted on Twitter and YouTube, Sanders took aim at some of the world's top hedge fund managers.
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"This situation has become so absurd," Sanders said in the video. "The top 15 hedge fund managers on Wall Street make more money in a single year than every kindergarten teacher in America combined — over 120,000 teachers."
Sanders went on to point out that the starting salary for teachers in almost 40% of school districts is less than $40,000 and that 43% of teachers make less than $60,000 per year. Meanwhile, the top 15 hedge fund managers earned $13.8 billion last year, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
It's important to note that teachers and hedge fund managers earn their money in different ways, making it difficult to compare the two. Unlike teachers, hedge fund managers can lose money in any given year if their fund has clawback clauses and no management fees. Hedge fund compensations are linked to performance, which implies that the most well-paid and richest hedge fund managers are also the best performers.
Nonetheless, the vast income disparity between hedge fund managers and teachers has drawn criticism from Sanders and others.
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This certainly isn't the first time Sanders has taken on the ultra-wealthy. He's been doing it for years. In 2019, Sanders tweeted, "There should be no billionaires. We are going to tax their extreme wealth and invest in working people." He proposed a wealth tax on the top 0.1% of households. He argued that the ultra-wealthy have benefited from a rigged system and that it's time to level the playing field for working people.
And in 2020, Sanders took to Twitter again to blast the wealthy elite. "The richest 400 Americans sit on $3 trillion — the size of the entire U.K. economy," he wrote. "The billionaire class now pays a lower tax rate than people living paycheck to paycheck. The looting of America has been going on for over 40 years, and the culprits are the ultra-rich."
It's clear that Sanders has a bone to pick with the ultra-wealthy, and he's not afraid to speak out about it. Whether his message will resonate with the American public remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure — the debate over the role of the wealthy in the U.S. economy is far from over.
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