 Hi, this is Senator Bernie Sanders. I need your help. One of the reasons our campaign is doing so well is that we are discussing the real issues facing the American people, something that most politicians and the media just don't do. In fact, one of the great concerns I have had for many, many years is that the corporate media looks at elections as if they were a baseball game in terms of who's winning or losing or how much money a candidate is raising or even a soap opera. You know, what kind of dumb things somebody said yesterday that we can put all over CNN. But in my view, what this election should be about, what our democracy should be about is a debate concerning the enormous problems facing our people and in fact our entire planet. And that's what I intend to be focusing on throughout this campaign. Now today, I'm going to be talking about the incredibly important issue of income and wealth inequality and I very much would appreciate your help in getting this video out to your friends and to your family. The economic reality for most Americans is pretty clear. For the last 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing and more Americans are living in poverty than almost any point in our nation's history. Today, real median family income is almost $5,000 less than it was in 1999. Today, the typical male worker is making $783 less last year than he did 42 years ago after adjusting for inflation. The typical female worker is making $1,337 less than she did in 2007. Despite the modest gains of the Affordable Care Act, 35 million Americans continue to have no health insurance and even more are underinsured. And today, embarrassingly, the United States of America has by far the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major industrialized country on earth. And while the middle class continues to disappear over the last two years, just as an example, the wealthiest 15 Americans in this country, 15 people. And that includes Bill Gates, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and a bunch of others. These guys have seen their wealth increase by $170 billion. That's just an increase in what they previously had in a two-year period. To put this in perspective, that increase in wealth for the top 15 Americans is more wealth than is owned by the bottom 40 percent of our people, and it is doubled what this country spends on nutrition programs to feed over 40 million Americans. Meanwhile, since 2005, the typical middle class family has seen its wealth go down by more than 36 percent from $130,000 in 2005 to just $81,000 today. We have witnessed an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to multimillionaires and billionaires. Since 1985, the share of our nation's wealth owned by the bottom 90 percent, 90 percent, has plummeted from 36 percent to just 23 percent. Now what does this mean? It means that if the bottom 90 percent, the vast majority of our people, had simply maintained the same share of wealth they had 30 years ago, they would have over $10 trillion more today than they in fact do have. Now where did that wealth go? Well, about $8 trillion of it has gone to a tiny, tiny sliver of the wealthiest people in our country. Over the past 30 years, the top 1 tenth of 1 percent, not 1 percent, 1 tenth of 1 percent has seen its share of our nation's wealth more than double from 10 percent to 22 percent. The very, very rich are getting incredibly richer. The middle class is disappearing and the poor are getting poorer. That is the tragic reality of our economy today. This is the Robert Hood principle in reverse. We are taking from the poor and working families and seeing that wealth go to a handful of the richest people in this country. That is wrong, that is unacceptable and that is not what the American economy should be about. The concentration of wealth at the very top is more than bad economics. It is immoral and it is unsustainable. Instead of growing an economy with good wages where anyone can unlock their useful potential, we are undermining our middle class, undermining the needs of our kids, undermining the heart of our democracy. Now, if we are serious about reversing income in wealth inequality, what are some of the things that we need to do? First, we have got to make sure that anybody in America who works 40 hours a week is not living in poverty and that means that over a period of a few years we have got to increase the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour. Furthermore, we need to make certain that we have pay equity for women work is absurd, that women continue to make 78 cents on the dollar compared to men. Second of all, we have to put the American people back to work and that means a trillion dollar job program to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure which will result in up to 13 million decent paying jobs. Third, we need a tax system which is fair and among other things. We need to put a tax on Wall Street speculation so that every American regardless of income can go to college tuition free. Now, as many of you know, seven years ago, the taxpayers of this country as a result of the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, our country, our middle class bailed them out. Well, now it is Wall Street's turn to make sure that they help the middle class of this country and that all of our people regardless of income can get to college. In my view, a society in which so many have so little while so few have so much is not what the United States of America is supposed to be about. If you agree, please make sure to share this video and the facts in this video with your friends and your neighbors, but also with your Republican co-workers and the Republicans that you know. To my mind, it is a very sad state of affairs that we have too many working class Republicans who continue to vote against their own best interest. And my hope is that by engaging in a good, honest, straightforward dialogue with our Republican friends, we can win them over so that they can help us create a government which works for all of the people and not just the Koch brothers and a handful of billionaires. So once again, thank you very much for listening and thanks for your help in getting this video out. Take care.