Bernie Sanders Steals Sherrod Brown’s Idea, Makes it Dumber

On September 5, Bernie Sanders will introduce legislation to impose a 100% tax on all government benefits received by workers at large corporations. Essentially, if you’re a large corporation and your workers use government benefits, you gotta pay for that.

Sanders spent most of the announcement video for this plan attacking Jeff Bezos over a trap beat. Not mentioned in the video? Sherrod Brown, who originally came up with this idea a year ago.

Sherrod Brown describes the idea, in 2017, as follows:

The Corporate Freeloader Fee applies only to mega-corporations who file at least $100,000 in payroll taxes with the IRS daily for at least 180 days straight. It would not apply to Ohio small businesses. The Corporate Freeloader Fee levies a fee based on the number of employees at a company who earn less than 218 percent of the federal poverty rate, or $26,250 in 2017. The fee increases as the percentages of a company’s workforce who earn less than a living goes up. Companies can reduce fees by providing healthcare benefits and making contributions to employee retirement plans…

Brown and his office have been working on this plan since the fall of 2015. Some of the policies outlined in Brown’s plan are new ideas. Others Democrats have talked about before, but they’ve never been laid out as part of a broader agenda to restore the value of work for all Americans.

Brown’s plan had some nuance to it. In a 77-page white paper, he described sliding scales based on the ratio of affected employees, outlined how to incorporate health care and retirement plans into his calculations, accounted for subcontractors, seasonal workers and the gig economy, and backed it all up with dozens of precise calculations based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics going back nearly 50 years.

Sanders, who never supported or even acknowledged Brown’s plan when it came out, does not have any such nuance. Instead, he simply wants to tax businesses for 100% of all government expenditures on their employees. Sherrod’s plan, while detailed, was still economically-questionable populism that would have increased unemployment and offshoring of low-wage work (something Bernie used to care quite a lot about). Bernie’s proposal, like so many before it, is little more than a poorly-thought-through bumper sticker of an idea, with immediate and obvious economic consequences that Republicans can, and will, point out, and hold up as an example of the sort of stupid legislation Democrats might enact if they retake Congress.

For instance, Sanders specifically mentions public housing in his video. In his bill, if an employee lives in public housing, their employer would be taxed for 100% of the cost of that housing. This is an enormous cost and would simply lead to large employers refusing to hire people who live in public housing, pushing those people further into poverty as they are unable to find jobs. Brown’s plan was explicitly based on a combination of wages, retirement contributions and health insurance, thus avoiding this obvious pitfall.

So why didn’t Sanders just use Brown’s bill, since it’s smarter, better, and the work has already been done?

First of all, Sanders has an ongoing feud with Brown. Although the two used to be best friends in the Senate, and often introduced similar legislation and supported each other’s ideas, Brown chose to endorse Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Ohio primary, which Hillary won in a landslide. Politico described Bernie’s feelings on this “betrayal”:

Aides say Sanders thinks that progressives who picked Clinton are cynical, power-chasing chickens — like Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of his most consistent allies in the Senate before endorsing Clinton and campaigning hard for her ahead of the Ohio primary. Sanders is so bitter about it that he’d be ready to nix Brown as an acceptable VP choice, if Clinton ever asked his advice on who’d be a good progressive champion.

Although Bernie predictably sent those same aides out to deny everything in the article, since 2016 he has not worked with Sherrod, and Sherrod has refused to sign onto Bernie’s Medicare for All legislation. Friendship ended!

The bigger problem, though, is that Sherrod’s bill does not fit on a bumper sticker. It can not be easily summarized with a Twitter hashtag or a pithy remark in a stump speech. Bernie does not introduce plans with any intention of getting them passed, he introduces plans to get attention and make himself the progressive hero. It’s a familiar pattern with Bernie: take an idea other Democrats are already working on, stake out the most extreme position, introduce “legislation” that does nothing but repeat his sound bytes, then bully Democrats into supporting it and attack Democrats who don’t bend the knee — even those who were previously doing hard, practical work on the issue — all while acting like it was his idea all along.

We see this now with universal health care. Back in 2017, in the aftermath of the Obamacare repeal failure, there were tons of Democrats working on legislation to achieve universal health care through a public option or incremental improvements to Obamacare. Bernie threw all that out the window by demanding that we shut down all insurance companies and instead put everyone on Medicare. Now he travels around the country demanding that all Democrats sign onto his Medicare For All bill. He ignores all alternatives and erases all the hard work his colleagues did to achieve practical, realistic universal health care — in fact, if those same colleagues don’t sign onto Medicare For All, they risk being accused by Sanders of being “bought and paid for by big pharma and the insurance agencies.” It’s incredibly counterproductive, but Bernie isn’t in the Senate to get things done, he’s in the Senate to start a revolution!

Bernie doesn’t think his bill is better than Sherrod’s. He just knows it’s easier to understand, and therefore when he goes around the country demanding everyone support it, people won’t care that Sherrod, Warren, and many other Democrats had been working on similar ideas for years. They’ll see Bernie leading, and “corporate Democrats” reluctant to follow. That’s Bernie’s plan.

So a month from now when you see Bernie on CNN pushing this bill and calling out Democrats for supporting “corporate welfare”, remember that it wasn’t actually his idea, and that his entire goal is to profit at the expense of his colleagues. Some leader.