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‘Someone dumb is going to come in there, some actual populist, and wreck everything. And it’s going to be a poor country, and the rich people will leave… You don’t wanna live in that place like that, and we’re going to become that place if we don’t pull back a little bit and do what Teddy Roosevelt did, which is just try to enfranchise a larger number of people in our system.’
That answer from Tucker Carlson led Vox senior political reporter Jane Coaston to draw an unlikely comparison between the conservative Fox News host and Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.
And, interestingly enough, Carlson didn’t recoil in horror of being painted with the same brush as the Vermont socialist.
“His basic critique that the system is rigged on the behalf of a small number of people, it’s totally true,” Carlson said in a Vox interview that was published on Tuesday. “That’s completely true. And I’m absolutely happy to say that Bernie Sanders is right about that, because he is.”
Of course, he also threw a couple jabs in Sanders’s direction. “Name three of Bernie Sanders’s solutions that wouldn’t make him more powerful, and I don’t think you can find them,” Carlson said. “So alarm bells should be going off.”
Then again, he wasn’t completely done sounding a whole lot like Sanders, either. “This isn’t the free market at all,” Carlson said. “This is a rigged game whose beneficiaries are small in number.”
The exchange was just part of a broader interview with Carlson focusing on what he believes is the gutting of America at the hands of “vulture capitalism” and why conservatives should take action.
Carlson called for deep-pocketed financiers to hold “some obligation to the country around them” and help build instead of tear down.
Here’s a segment from last week in which he covered the topic:
Carlson, again like Bernie, voiced concerns in the Vox interview for the dying middle class and what needs to be done to restore it.
“I think what we should be having is, like, an honest conversation about who’s getting rich and why, and we never have that conversation, ever,” he said. “It’s very distressing. And Republicans are a huge part of the problem.”
One “scam” Carlson believes needs to be remedied immediately is something Donald Trump promised on his campaign trail but has yet to address: The carried-interest loophole, which gives wealthy private-equity types a massive tax benefit.
“There’s no way to defend that. It’s immoral, and Trump promised to get rid of it. Well, why hasn’t he? Well, he hasn’t because Republicans aren’t eager to do it,” Carlson said of the loophole, which he described as “a bipartisan [conspiracy] designed to protect the economic interests of Wall Street.”
He explained that closing the loophole — which allows financiers to pay the lower capital-gains tax rate on much of their income — could go a long way in effecting positive change across a country in dire need of leveling the playing field.
“Let’s just make a really clear statement about our values and tax labor at the same rate we tax capital,” Carlson said. “I’m paying literally twice the rate of some weed-smoking, porn-addicted moron who inherited his money and stays home all day. That’s a system that perpetuates the inequality that’s making this country volatile and crazy and bringing it to the point of collapse.”
Bernie couldn’t have said that last part better himself.
