More than 120 people attended Senator Sanders’ town meeting outside of Springfield High School.

Bernie addressed a wide range of issues including, education, the war in Afghanistan, the role of lobbyists, health care, the national debt, the need for a progressive estate tax, and the Supreme Court’s recent decision that allows corporations to spend without limits to influence elections.

On education, Bernie said students who drop out of school “are going nowhere in a hurry.” The senator said more resources need to be spent on mentoring programs to ensure students stay in school.

“You put a few dollars into kids like that, you save some lives,” Senator Sanders said.

On the war in Afghanistan, one Vermonter lamented the lack of notable progress in the war in Afghanistan, adding “nobody pays attention any more in this country.”

“More and more people are becoming more and more discouraged,” Bernie said, referring the Afghanistan War.

Vermont has a large stake in the war. More members of the Vermont National Guard are deployed there, some 1,500 soldiers, since any time since World War II.

Responding to a question blaming lobbyists as the root of many of the problems in Washington, D.C, Senator Sanders took a different tact. “The problem is not the lobbyists. It’s the Congress, itself. They have to learn to stand up to these people,” Bernie said. 

Senator Sanders also discussed the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision, known as “Citizens United,” that for first time said corporations were, in effect, people. Consequently, corporations can spend unlimited sums to influence elections. Republicans blocked efforts in the Senate to scale back that ruling.

Bernie also addressed the erroneous perceptions that middle-class Americans or Vermont farmers will be subject to the inheritance tax under legislation he proposed. “What you are looking at is a big lie, propagated over and over again,” Senator Sanders said of right-wing efforts to cast the estate tax on millionaires and billionaires as a “death tax” that would be applied on working families.

The legislation sponsored by Senator Sanders and three Democratic senators would exempt the first $3.5 million of wealth (the first $7 million for couples) and phased in an inheritance tax. (Read Bernie’s Op-Ed on the Estate tax)

Another question from the crowd: “What are you going to do about the national debt?”

Bernie acknowledged the mounting national debt is a serious issue that must be addressed.  But there is a right way and a wrong way to accomplish that. “They are saying we have to cut back on all these programs that people are using. Bad idea,” Senator Sanders said.

Senator Sanders noted a variety of options to scale back federal spending to reduce the debt without punishing working families. Some of those solutions include smarter military spending priorities that would eliminate wasteful practices, such as buying billions of dollars of unnecessary parts and purchasing weapons systems that are poorly suited to fight terrorists, and implementing a sensible estate tax that would generate more than $300 billion over the next decade.