Name: How Bernie Sanders Answers A Question
Uploaded: 2026-02-03T17:00:36.000Z
Duration: 9 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Is there an increase in taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare for all?

Adverbs of degree

Or rather, where would the tax burden go to pay for that?

Okay, under my legislation, which has 15 co sponsors, I believe in the Senate now, nobody in America will pay any more premiums.

Just talked to a woman the other day who pays $1,700 a month, $20,000 a year gone.

Right now, 500,000 people in America go bankrupt because of medical bills.

Nobody in America under my bill will pay more than $200 a year in total for their prescription drugs and will stop the ripping off of the American people by the pharmaceutical industry.

Now, having said that, is health care free?

So what we do is exempt the first $29,000 of a person's income.

You pay nothing in taxes above that in a progressive way, with the wealthiest people in this country paying the largest percentage.

But if I say to you that right now you're paying 20,000 a year in a tax called a premium for the insurance companies, that that's gone.

And then I say, Stephen, you're paying $10,000 a year now to the federal government.

You'd ask me, where do I sign off to that?

A little over four very, very long years ago, I made a video about the way then candidate Donald Trump answers a question.

I tried to show that Trump's salesmanlike phraseology was very effective at communicating a feeling to the listener, even if the actual claims were bogus or nonsensical.

I don't think this is the only reason he won in 2016, but

his skill as a communicator was definitely a big part.

Like Trump, Bernie Sanders, who is currently leading the contest for the Democratic nomination for president, has a talent for communication in a million ways that I won't enumerate here.

These two men are very different, obviously, but

the polls and the votes show that they both know how to connect with with voters.

And a significant reason for this, I think, is the way they wield language.

Today I want to take a look at Sanders answer to a question that he gets a lot.

And I think an interesting place to start might be to look back at what I said about Trump's speaking style and see how Sanders compares.

After all, both these answers Happen to be the same number of words, 220.

Though Sanders takes an extra 30 seconds to get through them, which I'll get back to in a little bit.

So these are the four things I said about Trump's speech.

The first two are about his simplicity, both in the words he chooses.

I want to find out what is the problem, what's going on, and the way he constructs sentences.

These people, they did not come from Sweden.

The third thing I noted was his ability to reframe an assumed negative reaction to what he was saying by his use of the second person point of view.

And you watched last night and you see people talking about and by implicating us in what he's saying, as if we've already agreed.

I've had so many people call me and say thank you.

And finally, I pointed out how Trump likes to end his sentences with punch, with words that will leave you with a thematic sense of the emotional content he's trying to convey.

Fourteen people dead, other people going to die, they're so badly injured.

About three quarters of his answer were one syllable.

Here's how he stacks up against Trump with more complicated words.

It looks like Bernie uses significantly more three syllable words, but otherwise a somewhat similar breakdown.

They both understand that rhythmic series of short, simple words can burrow into the listener's head.

Of course, Bernie doesn't need to use short words to find rhythm.

The reason he takes longer than Trump to get through the same amount of words is because he gives every single syll to breathe.

Now, in sentence construction, Bernie's answer is more complex than Trump's.

In fact, he starts his answer with two dependent clauses back to back.

Under my legislation, which has 15 co sponsors, I believe, in the Senate now, he's also talking a lot about things that require a basic understanding of politics, health care and taxation, which makes his language necessarily more sophisticated.

As for reframing negative reaction, he does that in a similar way to Trump by putting the listener directly into his answer.

In this case, using Colbert as a stand in for all of us.

You'd ask me, where do I sign up for that?

And finally, yes, he does end his sentences with punch, just not in the way that Trump does.

By using thematic words, Sanders uses apistrophe, a stylistic device in which you repeat words at the end of sentences for effect.

You can almost see your out of pocket medical bills blipping out of existence.

So there are actually some interesting similarities in the way Trump and Bernie speak, but

of course these answers aren't perfectly comparable and there are a lot of differences in their styles as well.

Trump is singular in the way he improvs stream of consciousness rants that often look incoherent when read back, yet connect with his supporters in the moment.

Sanders, on the other hand, has been preaching about the same things for decades.

He sharpened his message to a fine point, which is extra impressive when you consider that so much of his rhetoric has to do with context.

Colbert asks him if he's going to raise taxes, and to his credit he's willing to answer yes.

But it's here, couched in 200 words of fine tuned context, he has to explain why, in his view, raising taxes isn't the scary thing it's assumed to be when you factor in all your premiums and co payments, the artificially high prices of prescription drugs set by a pharmaceutical industry that's ripping us off.

He's ensuring us that the richer will get taxed more and struggling people not at all.

Overall, we'll pay less in taxes, he wants to say, since current healthcare costs are a tax in all but name one that can be and has been devastating to many among us.

For Bernie, I've noticed that foregrounding the important context is a game of volume, volume and emphasis.

While it might seem like he's yelling all the time, Bernie does modulate a lot.

And if you pick out the moments when his pitch where his volume ramps up, you can see a sketch of what he wants the listener to take away.

Nobody in America will pay any more premiums.

No more CO payments, no more out of pocket expenses.

All of that is gone for their prescription drugs.

If I say to you you're 10,000 to the good, you'd ask me, where do I sign off for that?

As with my Trump video four years ago, I'm not trying to make a comment on Bernie Sanders politics, I'm just obsessed with the way politicians attempt to communicate with voters.

Sanders obviously has a good sense of rhythm and delivery and an iron grip on the points he wants to make.

But what's even more masterful is his ability to articulate an ideology out of all the things that surround his answer to a question in a way that often makes the questions feel not only stupid, but

a symptom of the stupid worldview that he's trying to fight against.

It remains to be seen whether those principles can win the presidency or even the Democratic nomination.

Regardless, they have a powerful messenger hey everybody, thank you so much for watching this episode was brought to you by Squarespace if you don't know, you can use Squarespace to make beautiful websites for anything you might need.

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