Originally published on Forbes.com.
I spent the better part of Saturday morning to get more insight into where the Sanders campaign might end up on marginal income tax rates. I didn’t get very far on my quest, but it still made for an interesting morning. I had received an invitation to the opening of the Worcester Sanders for President Campaign Office. The office has an interesting location at 256 Park Avenue, the site of a former Oriental Rug Gallery with a common entrance with El Basha Restaurant. It is less than half a block from That’s Entertainment, which bills itself as a Pop-culture emporium. I’m wondering if the millennials working in the office will be sneaking out early on Tuesdays for the Magic Booster Draft.
The Setting
The weather was mild for this time of year, the kind of cloudy cold drizzling rain that my high school classmates described as “Worcestering” when we first arrived in the heart of the commonwealth and heard people calling soda tonic and water fountains bubblers and we were disappointed to find that you could not buy pizza by the slice. After nearly fifty years, I have finally made the complete conversion, except that accent, and go about wearing a Red Sox hat, more as a regional marker, than as an act of fandom. Surprisingly, I was the only one with the normally ubiquitous B on my head.
The oriental rug lettering was still on the overhang, but a series of Bernie 2016 lawn signs taped to the inside of the window told me I was at the right place. By the time the fairly small bare room with just a lectern and some desks off to the side filled up there were about 50 people there, by my count. Chris Horton told me this morning that total attendance was 85 counting people coming and going with a peak of 65. I find that plausible. It was a while before the main event kicked off and I mingled asking my single question, but I’ll give you a quick run down of the ceremonies first.
The Event
Paul Feeney. the campaign’s Massachusetts State Director, led off. He told us that his organizing experience came from the labor movement, which accounts for him calling us brothers and sisters. I see from his linked-in profile that he was a legislative director for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers before signing on with the campaign. He told us that Bernie’s campaign was a departure from traditional transactional politics. He went through the litany of goals finishing with universal single payer health care, which got a rousing cheer. The bus from the nurses union parked out front might have helped with that.
Next up was Mary Keefe, a Worcester state rep. She said that Bernie was somebody that you might not agree with on everything, but you could trust him. She reminisced about being able to go to the Mass College of Arts for $250 per semester. Back in the day, you could tell your mechanic father and stay at home mom that you wanted to be an artist and they would tell you that was great, work hard in the summer to earn your tuition. There is this odd thing that stories like that sometimes make me think that Bernie is actually the most conservative candidate.
Getting Out The Vote
Paul was back up and letting everybody know how grass roots the campaign was and that it wasn’t a national campaign or even a state campaign but 351 local campaigns. (That’s how many cities and towns we have in Massachusetts.) Unless I missed something the only presidential candidates to make it to Worcester are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Doesn’t look like Donald Trump will be opening a Worcester office, but I’m sure if he did it would be really great. Maybe he would add a few dozen stories to the glass building across from City Hall that I still insist on calling the Worcester County National Bank Building. I think it was Fleet when I worked there before my firm decamped to Westborough.
Lisa Mosczynski, the Regional Field Director, was up next. She said she was going to be very demanding of people bugging them to go out canvassing and work the phone banks. She said, quoting Ed Markey, that “We don’t agonize. We organize”. I had to call Chris Horton, who had invited me to the event, to clarify the spelling of Ms. Mosczynski’s name and he reemphasized that message telling me that Bernie has huge support among young people, but said young people have no understanding of the importance of identifying potential voters and getting them out to vote.
The Question
I managed to pry something of a tax plan out of the Sanders campaign several months ago. The one thing that they continue to be coy about is the top marginal rate. This has great minds like Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly saying Bernie Sanders will tax you at 90%, which Bernie has more or less said he will not do because he is not as much of a socialist as Dwight Eisenhower. So I decided to ask the Bernie supporters at the event what they thought the top marginal rate should be.
There did not seem to be much of a consensus. Deb Bock, my first victim, said 15%. I hadn’t gotten into the listening groove yet so I failed to hide my shock and asked her why she wasn’t backing Ben Carson – “Because he is an idiot.” It’s really too bad how in some circles now people will be stuck with saying rocket scientist when describing somebody really smart.
Next came Bill Kilmer, who is actually vaguely related to Joyce Kilmer. Bill said that rate should be as high as possible without affecting the economy. I was thinking that would be like 0%, but he insisted it didn’t work that way. He got into the national debt, noting that it might not be a good idea to pay it all the way down, since the last time that was done in the Jackson administration and the economy tanked, although maybe that was because of the elimination of the national bank. I realized, then that I was not going to make it through the whole crowd.
That’s A Stupid Question
Next up was a fellow who did not want to give his name, so I’ll call him Chief. Chief had a World War II veteran hat on with a small pin representing a plane I was not familiar with. I guessed B-25, but it was a Douglas A-26 Invader, which went into service in Europe late in 1944. Chief would have been a pilot but when the group he was with got to Louisiana there were no planes available, so he ended up a crew chief.
Chief thought that the marginal rate question was really stupid, but he had a lot more to say to me and I was really tempted to abandon my project and just talk to him all morning. He thinks the main problem is a lack of enforced accountability of politicians and that what we need is accountability, responsibility and respect.
I could not resist asking Chief about his purple and white umbrella, which you could see had the image of a crusader on part of it. He told me that the umbrella had actually been owned by Tommy Heinson and asked me if I had ever heard of Bob Cousy, which was really funny, since Holy Cross students in the early seventies would be regaled with stories from old time employees about when the “Cous” was there. That 1947 NCAA tournament cast a long shadow. As it turned out, Chief was a graduate of the University of Vermont.
Other Answers
Nora Watson did not have an opinion on the top marginal rate, but was in favor of lifting the social security cap and the Wall Street transaction tax. Brian thought it should be in the mid-sixties, although there should be more brackets. The first youngster I managed to ask, told me that he was on staff and could not give a opinion. Paul thought it should be 25%, indicating that you don’t have to agree with Bernie on everything to support him. Paul told me about somebody’s plan that is based on quarters, but I have not been able to track that down. At the end of my project I did catch an 80% “since only rich people pay it” and Gerald Cardinal and Steve Greenberg were 90%.
In between all that, I found somebody who was even more colorful than Chief. Mike Lally of Charlton perhaps embodies the spirit of the older Bernie Sanders supporter more than anybody. He talked about coming here from Ireland in the fifties and serving three years in the Army, and then putting himself through college – essentially living the American dream, although a more complicated version than most of us. He sees Bernie as embodying an energy that will “end the American nightmare:.
Maybe We’ll Know Soon
State Director, Paul Feeney, told me that the campaign will probably be issuing a full-blown tax plan before Iowa. From my limited survey, it seems that supporters are not attached to a high marginal rate, which I happen to think is a very bad idea. According to the Tax Foundation 74% would only raise about $2.37 trillion over ten years on a dynamic basis. More anecdotally, I remember what it was like prior to 1986, when people could be persuaded to do preposterous things, since the government would be paying half or more of the cost.