"So this combination of huge amounts of political money flowing into the system from big special interests kept secret from the American public, has dramatically added to the long-term difficulty of trying to have fairness in Congress."
"I think we have a problem of an unfortunate circularity between wealth and political influence."
"Simple fairness is reason enough to end this rigged system."
"Mike, I would actually really like working with you on this. As you know, there's substantial overlap in our thinking and in our experience."
"I watched that get dramatically worse after the Citizens United decision, when wealthy special interests could spend unlimited amounts of money in politics."
"Letting wealthy business owners avoid Medicare taxes on their full income costs Medicare $250 billion in lost revenue."
"One of the things that I have experienced in my time in the Senate is the extent to which Congress is responsive to big special interests and to extremely wealthy individuals."
"This corrupted Tax Code lets billionaires pay an average tax rate of just 8.2 percent, less than half the rate of a typical teacher or firefighter."
"To run an unjust tax system that creates bigger deficits for the sake of wealthy political influence is not a good place for the United States of America to be."
"If you believe in a progressive tax system, they should be paying a lot more than 25 percent, because when one percent of the population gets 22 percent of the entire country's income, more than the e..."
"Which they can put into a pricing advantage and crush small businesses with a pricing advantage that they only got by hiding revenue offshore?"