Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace's little game of pity the poor rich man didn't go over so well with Sen. Bernie Sanders. The Democratic presidential candidate pretty well laughed in Wallace's face when he tried to pretend that our political system isn't rigged for the rich because the percentage of the income taxes they've paid has gone up.
WALLACE: Senator, one of the central points in your campaign, you say it over and over again, is that the American economic system is, in your words, rigged. But I want to go over some numbers with you. In 1981, the top 1 percent paid 17 percent of all income taxes. Now the top 1 percent pays 37 percent. Question, sir, if the wealthy have rigged the system, why have they done such a lousy job of it?
SANDERS: Oh, Chris, I think you are missing the major point here. And that is, what we have seen in recent years is a huge transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 0.1 percent, whose percentage of wealth in America has doubled. We're talking about trillions of dollars going from the middle class to the top 0.1 percent.
WALLACE: But, sir, isn't a lot of that because of the economic policies of President Obama and of the Federal Reserve, which put interest rates at basically zero?
SANDERS: No. These are policies that have gone on for a long, long time on the Republican administrations and Democratic administration. Now, are we better off today than we were when President Bush left office and we were losing 800,000 jobs a month? Of course we are. But for the last 40 years, what we have been seeing is a middle class disappearing, people working longer hours for low wages and today, as it happens, 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. That's a rigged economy to my mind, Chris.
Wallace, for his part, was at least not silly enough to try to argue with Sanders and simply moved onto the next topic.
