Why Bernie Sanders Is Calling Out Hillary Clinton on Paid Family Leave

It seems that all hell has broken out with the Sanders campaign this week in two major areas: paid family leave and the cost of Bernie's single-payer health care plan. Bernie's proposed middle-class tax increases for both items are being rejected by the Clinton campaign.

Re the paid family leave, both candidates agree on 12 weeks of paid leave. Bernie supports the Gillibrand bill that would increase the payroll tax by .2% or $1.38 a week for the median wage. Clinton believes she has another way to pay for the bill.

The Sanders campaign is calling Hillary out on not supporting Gillibrand, except that not only has the New York Senator endorsed Hillary but she was sitting in the front row in Iowa Sat night AND Hillary acknowledged her. So OBVIOUSLY Gillibrand knows what Hillary has in mind -- and SHE doesn't feel that Hillary has flip-flopped at all.

It is clear that with this week's 2 million strong Service Employees International Union endorsement, the Sanders campaign is on the ropes. The same boys who boasted to Bloomberg just three weeks ago that they might consider Hillary for VP if they didn't accidentally hit her with a Mack truck -- well, these Bernie boys are up against the wall.

Obviously, Hillary and Gillibrand are cooking something up -- and Bernie is throwing plates in the kitchen. That language should be on Blue Menu Politics, but this is what it sounds like to me.

Clinton Hits Sanders on Middle Class Tax Hikes

The Bernie Sanders campaign is in orbit this week over claims by the Clinton campaign that Bernie plans a significant increase in middle class taxes to pay for his single-payer health care system.

This is the problem. 1) Bernie is on record with his proposed taxes increases of roughly 9% to pay for legislation that he has already introduced; 2) When asked at the Iowa debate Saturday night how he would pay for healthcare, Bernie admitted that they hadn't fully done the math. Say what????

We have FB friends who are exploding this week, calling HC every name in the book. It's a slugfest out there. Our biggest argument with all of Bernie's grand ideas concerned his math. So for the BS campaign to yell foul, when the HC campaign turns to his 2013 financing proposals for single-payer health care and he says "we haven't done the math" on today's plan, well the BS campaign is just being delusional about how politics works.

While the Republicans are in a total state of disarray, the Hillary Clinton campaign is pulling up the planks, getting ready to set sail. Let Bernie present his math to the nation. But don't be a crybaby when the Clinton campaign turns to your own recent proposals when they are the only documents out there.

I regret that our FB friends are calling Hillary a total bitch for calling Bernie out. Perhaps another reason that Wall Street likes her is that she can add and subtract.

Bernie Sanders has promised Americans the world, and he promises to get it all by taxing the billionaires, with a wave of his arms. The crowd roars.

Billionaires Can't (and Won't) Pick Up the Whole Tab

As Politico writes, Bernie cannot finance all his ideas by taxing billionaires. And he knew that in 2013.

“Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9-percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health-care plan,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon, referring to legislation Sanders introduced in 2013, “and simple math dictates he'll need to tax workers even more to pay for the rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda. If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes.”

Sanders introduced a single-payer health care bill in 2013 that included a 2.2 percent income tax across the board, as well as a 6.7 percent payroll tax for employers, The Washington Post reported Friday, and he has introduced similar legislation in multiple sessions of Congress. While payroll taxes are split between employers and employees, economists and the Congressional Budget Office have said that most of those fees are carried by the workers in the form of lower wages.

Sanders has yet to announce the details of how he will pay for the national single-payer, "Medicare for all Americans" proposal that is a major plank of his presidential campaign. Economic experts have said it would be impossible to institute a single-payer system relying solely on tax hikes on the wealthy. Sanders camp has argued in response that in the long run, the single-payer system will save the country trillions of currently wasted dollars.