Bernie Sanders Sits In SILENCE After Trump’s Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent BRUTALLY DESTROY Him.
The Morality of Millions: How D.C. Plays God with the Nation’s Health and Wealth
The recent Senate hearing featuring Senator Bernie Sanders and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant was not a debate; it was a brazen, agonizing glimpse into the moral abyss of modern American governance. It was a confrontation that laid bare the cruel, calcified priorities of an administration perfectly content to trade the health and very lives of working-class citizens for a lavish, unnecessary gift to the super-rich.
Sanders opened the exchange with a question that should haunt every decent person: How can an administration justify showering $235 billion in tax breaks on a tiny fraction of the wealthiest families while simultaneously gutting the healthcare essential to keeping 50,000 low-income and working-class people alive each year? This is not just bad policy; it is moral negligence on a scale that beggars belief.
Bessant’s response was a masterpiece of corporate deflection—smug, evasive, and devoid of any genuine compassion. Confronted with the fact that his tax proposal was designed to benefit the top two-tenths of one percent of the country by expanding the estate tax exemption—a provision that only kicks in for colossal fortunes and whose savings go to the heirs of multi-billionaires—he tried to pivot. He claimed the tax act helped small businesses. This is a transparent, risible lie. The multi-billion-dollar gift to a “few hundred families” has precisely zero to do with the “mom and pop” shop down the street. It is, as Sanders rightly labeled it, a pure, unadulterated handout, a piece of cronyism so egregious it can only be explained by the administration’s own roster of billionaires in key positions, all ready to pass the collection plate to themselves.
The Secretary’s supposed defense—that the top 10% paid a bigger share of overall taxes after the 2017 act—is an irrelevant statistic designed to obfuscate the core crime. The argument is not about the general tax burden of the top 10%; it is about this specific, gratuitous provision that channels a quarter-trillion dollars away from public good and into the already overflowing vaults of the hyper-wealthy. Bessant could not justify it because, as Sanders correctly asserted, “morally it is totally unjustifiable.”
When cornered on the indefensible tax breaks, the conversation predictably shifted to the destruction of the social safety net. The plan to cut $700 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act is not an act of fiscal responsibility; it is an economic death warrant. Estimates suggest over 15 million people will lose their health insurance, a catastrophic failure that researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania predict will lead to the unnecessary deaths of approximately 50,000 people annually. Bessant’s cold dismissal of this horrifying figure, claiming it was “overstated,” only underscored the administration’s cynical disregard for human life.
His attempted rationale, centered on “work requirements” and the targeting of “illegal aliens on Medicaid,” is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on the poor and the vulnerable. This punitive approach to social services relies on the cruel, false narrative that people who need help are “lazy.” Sanders masterfully dismantled this by pointing out the simple, painful reality of the American labor market: over 20 million people leave their jobs every year for reasons entirely beyond their control—illness, caregiving responsibilities, or a necessary move. To impose work requirements in a way that strips medical coverage from a mother who has to leave her job to care for a sick spouse, or a worker transitioning after a layoff, is not reform; it is sadism masquerading as policy.
The entire hearing served as a damning indictment of a political system utterly compromised by wealth. It showed an administration that prioritizes the dynastic wealth transfer of a “few hundred families” over the lives of tens of thousands of working people. Secretary Bessant’s smooth rhetoric about strengthening the “economy as a whole” and supporting “children and working families” rings completely hollow when his own policies are demonstrably designed to sacrifice those very families on the altar of billionaire greed. The defense was not a demonstration of facts, but a chilling exhibition of how far Washington is willing to debase itself to serve its patrons.
The stark takeaway is simple: the tax cuts for the ultra-rich and the massive cuts to healthcare are not separate, unrelated policies. They are two sides of the same debased coin—a clear, strategic reallocation of national resources that is designed to accelerate income inequality, deepen the suffering of the poor, and guarantee that in America, the privilege of enormous wealth is always worth more than the sanctity of human life. The exchange was heated, but the only lasting impression is the stench of hypocrisy and the cold calculation of a government that has ceased to care about its most vulnerable citizens.
