Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday laid out detailed tax reform proposals in letters to the Senate Finance Committee. They offered to keep senators’ submissions secret for 50 years. Sanders declined.  The Senate on Wednesday passed legislation that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will drive up what it costs students and their parents to borrow money for college. While President Obama was speaking at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., about helping the middle class, his White House aides were corralling votes for the student loan deal that mirrored a bill already passed by House Republicans. One reason the minimum wage should be increased is to prod Wal-Mart into paying its workers enough so the workers don’t have to rely on food stamps and Medicaid, Sanders argued in an interview on Wednesday. The Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on Wednesday approved a package of bills to improve benefits, including one to keep better track of efforts by the VA to eliminate an unacceptable backlog of cases.

Taxes Sens. Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate’s tax-writing committee, had assured senators that their proposals would be kept  confidential at the National Archives for 50 years. Sanders said he has nothing to hide. “Given the fact that my suggestions represent the interests of the middle class of this country and not powerful corporate special interests, I have no problem with making them public.”  The leaders of the tax-writing committee solicited suggestions as part of a push to simplify the tax code. “Everyone understands that our current tax code is too complex and must be simplified, but at a time when the American population is aging and investments in our crumbling infrastructure are desperately needed, we must not provide more tax breaks to profitable corporations and wealthiest Americans who already are doing phenomenally well and in some cases pay nothing in federal income taxes,” Sanders wrote to Baucus and Hatch. To read Sanders’ letters, click here and here and here.

Student Loans The Senate on Wednesday passed a White House-backed bill that will make students and parents pay more for college loans. The interest rate this year will exceed the 3.4 percent rate in effect for the past two years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, interest rates are likely to double by 2018. Bernie voted against the bill that closely mirrored a version passed by the most right-wing Congress in American history. “What I don’t understand is when you have a Democratic president, a Democratically-controlled Senate, why are we producing a bill which is basically a Republican bill?” Bernie asked in The New York Times. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill lets the government rake in $184 billion in student loan profits over the next 10 years. “Making huge profits off of young people and their families who want nothing more than to fulfill the American dream of being able to go to college is obscene,” Sanders said. Read The New York Times.

Domestic Surveillance In an unexpectedly close vote, the House on Wednesday defeated legislation that would have blocked the National Security Agency from collecting phone records. In the Senate, Sanders has proposed legislation to limit the NSA’s and FBI’s powers to secretly track phone calls of Americans who are not suspected of any wrongdoing as part of terrorism investigations. Sign a petition supporting Sanders’ Restore Our Privacy Act.

Minimum Wage In the midst of all the discussion about welfare reform, it turns out that the major welfare beneficiary in our country is the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame. The wealthiest family in America is worth more than $100 billion. One way they got so rich is by paying workers so little that tens of thousands of Wal-Mart employees use food stamps to feed their families and Medicaid to pay doctor bills. So with the number of Americans living in poverty in America near a 60-year high, with the gap between the rich and the rest of us growing wider and with youth unemployment in America at staggering levels, one proposal Bernie backs is raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. It’s been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. In addition to helping workers, a catch-up raise would have a side benefit. There would be “real savings for taxpayers who would not have to subsidize Wal-Mart because of its low wages,” Bernie told Chris Hayes on MSNBC. Some Republicans don’t just want to keep the minimum wage from going up. In a blunt exchange at a Senate hearing, Sen. Lamar Alexander told Bernie the minimum wage, on the books since the 1930s, should be abolished. Watch the MSNBC interview » Watch the Senate hearing » Read more about the minimum wage »

Veterans Benefits The Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on Wednesday approved a package of bills to improve benefits and health care services for veterans and their families. Chairman Sanders said the legislation includes a measure to bring the Department of Veterans Affairs in line with a Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage. Other legislation approved by the Committee would improve the delivery of care and benefits for veterans who experienced sexual assault in the military. Another bill would make the VA provide detailed reports to Congress on its effort to eliminate a staggering claims backlog.