Bernie Sanders’ Plan for America’s Young Adults
I first saw the video excerpt below at dailykos.com. It is well worth watching. Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) addressed the Senate on July 08, 2015.
In the 17-minute speech above, Sanders’ words are pointed as he tells Congress that it is “out of touch with the American people.” He talks of the need to raise the minimum wage. Sanders notes the redistribution of wealth in America over the last 30 years. He talks of the shrinking middle class, of how the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans own 22 percent of the wealth, and how the bottom 90 percent also own 22 percent of America’s wealth.
He notes that in America, “the richest country in the world ever,” around 50 percent of school children are on free or reduced lunch. Sanders also discussed parents drowning financially from trying to afford child care and calls for universal pre-K.
And he calls No Child Left Behind (NCLB) “a failure.”
Sanders next discusses youth unemployment, an issue he says has gone unaddressed, with over 5.5 million young people as either having dropped out of high school or having graduated and are not employed. Sanders cites that according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the average real unemployment rate for high school graduates between the ages of 17 and 20 was 33.8 percent for whites and 36.1 percent for Hispanics (April 2014 to March 2015). Sanders also noted that average real unemployment rate for black graduates and dropouts was 51.3 percent.
Sanders: “It is no great secret to anyone that without work, without education, without hope, people get into trouble…. In the US today, we have more people in jail than any other country on earth… more than China, with a population of over three times our population.” Sanders cites the tragedy that over half of America’s black males are Bernie Sanders’ Plan for America’s Young Adults | deutsch29:
