A Democratic senator from Colorado felt compelled to make the obvious more so to Fox News viewers Wednesday as he explained his problem with Republicans' economic policies.
"I'm not a Bolshevik," Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) said, referring to a 1900s-era radical communist faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The group promoted the ideas of Karl Marx.
Bennet fielded questions from anchor Neil Cavuto about a preliminary jobs review from the Bureau of Statistics that found 818,000 fewer jobs created this year than initially reported, as CNN reported Wednesday.
Despite analysts' explanations that job growth remains "historically strong," former President Donald Trump dubbed the not-yet-finalized report a "massive scandal" for Vice President Kamala Harris, who he baselessly accused of "padding" the numbers.
Bennet told Cavuto his economic concern was not about the data, but the Republican presidential nominee and policies he blamed for the 50 percent of lower-income Americans having less wealth than they did under former President Ronald Reagan.
"The bottom 50 percent of Americans own 2 percent of the wealth in America, the top 10 percent of Americans have 75 percent," Bennet said. "I'm not a socialist, those are the facts, Neil, of our economy."
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Bennet attacked the Reaganomics theory that argues corporation tax breaks create economic opportunities for middle- and lower-class Americans as "the kind of trickle-down economics that Donald Trump's tax policy represented."
"The American people desperately need us to have an economy that produces economic mobility for most Americans when it grows," Bennet said. "That is what we have to do, and if we don't, that is what is going to cause us to lose the democracy."
Bennet refused to comment on Vice President Kamala Harris' controversial price-gouging ban and then compared Trump tax cuts, which experts say skewed to the rich and eroded U.S. revenue, to Harris' support of his Child Tax Credit and a surprising promotor of it.
"It's interesting to me that nobody less than J.D. Vance himself has now said we should have a tax credit of no less than $5,000, which is more than I ever had proposed," Bennet said.
"Both parties should be competing on how to restore our middle class," he concluded. "I don't think that's a Bolshevik idea."
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