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"Don't tell me you can't provide a good nurse-staff ratio when you're paying your CEO at New York Presbyterian $26 million a year, the CEO at Montefiore $16 million a year, Mount Sinai $5 million a year," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
As the largest nurses strike in the history of New York City marched into its second week with no resolution in sight, US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Mayor Zohran Mamdani joined hundreds of picketers in the bitter cold on Tuesday to support their fight for better pay and workplace protections.
Last week, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) announced that nearly 15,000 NewYork-Presbyterian, Mount Sinai, and Montefiore hospital employees had "no choice" but to go on strike after the hospitals failed to meet their demands for safe staffing, workplace violence protections, safeguards against the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare, and to maintain 100% of their healthcare benefits.
Outside Mount Sinai West on 10th Avenue, Mamdani, attending his second picket, called for a "swift and urgent resolution" to the workers' demands after negotiations with the hospitals stalled last week and the chains began hiring replacement workers.
"This is about safe working conditions. This is about a fair contract. This is about dignity. And today is day nine—day nine—of those demands, and I want you to know that wherever I go in New York City, I hear about the plight of our nurses," the democratic socialist mayor said. "Now is your time of need, where we can ensure that this is a city that you don't just work in but a city that you can also live in."
In comments to CBS News New York, the hospital chains have scoffed at the NYSNA's demands for a 25% pay increase, especially in the wake of massive healthcare funding cuts from President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.
A spokesperson for NewYork-Presbyterian said its nurses—who it said earn $163,000 on average—are among the highest-paid in the city, calling demands for a pay increase "unrealistic." A Montefiore spokesperson told the network that progress on negotiations will be impossible until the nurses "back away from their reckless and dangerous $3.6 billion demands."
But New York is also one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage calculator, the nurses' wages are often barely enough to meet a family's basic needs, especially for single parents with children.
NYSNA, meanwhile, has said management "is threatening to discontinue or radically cut nurses’ health benefits" and has done nothing to combat severe understaffing.
"We’re talking an emergency room filled to the brink,” said one of the strikers, staff nurse Morgan Betancourt. “Ninety patients, and we have maybe nine nurses.”
On Tuesday, Sanders (I-Vt.) emphasized that the hospitals' sudden frugality has been of little concern when it comes to compensating hospital executives.
"Don't tell me you can't provide a good nurse-staff ratio when you're paying your CEO at NewYork Presbyterian $26 million a year, the CEO at Montefiore $16 million a year, Mount Sinai $5 million a year," Sanders shouted to applause from the strikers. "Don't tell me you can't treat nurses with dignity when you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on traveling nurses."
According to the Greater New York Hospital Association, the three hospitals combined had spent approximately $100 million to pay temporary nurses as of the fourth day of the strike. Temporary staffing agencies have required hospitals to pay scabs two to three times as much as they'd pay their regular nurses, Bloomberg reported.
Negotiations remain at a total standstill after breaking down last week. While the hospitals claim the union refused to budge on unreasonable demands, Jonathan Hunter, a negotiator for Mount Sinai nurses, told Spectrum News NY1, "They basically stonewalled us, presented us with nothing, and we left with nothing."
The strike has left the hospital system in a state of upheaval, forcing some patients to be moved and nonemergency surgeries to be canceled. Mamdani said it's all the more reason for the hospitals to reach an agreement with their workers.
"Too often when we see a strike, people forget that that is not where workers want to be," Mamdani said. "A strike is an act of last resort. What workers want is to be back at work. So what this will mean is making that possible. And so we call on every side to come back to that negotiating table. Have a swift and urgent resolution."
"While the president pledged that he would end inflation and now claims that prices are down, the data reflects what families are experiencing every day: higher costs that make it harder to make ends meet.”
A congressional report published Tuesday further undercut US President Donald Trump's claim that he has defeated inflation, estimating that the average American family paid $1,625 in higher costs last year as the Republican president's tariffs and broader policy agenda drove up prices across the nation's economy.
The new analysis by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) found that the $1,625 total includes $323 more for housing expenses and $241 more for transportation costs. In some states—including Alaska, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York—the average family paid more than $2,000 in higher costs in 2025 as prices for groceries, housing, and other necessities continued to rise under Trump's leadership.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), the ranking member of the JEC, said in a statement that "President Trump has imposed reckless tariffs, driven up healthcare costs, and created economic uncertainty. And because of these choices that he made, Americans are paying over $1,600 more than when he came into office."
“While the president pledged that he would end inflation and now claims that prices are down," Hassan added, "the data reflects what families are experiencing every day: higher costs that make it harder to make ends meet.”
The JEC report was released just weeks after Trump falsely proclaimed in a year-end address to the nation that "inflation is stopped" and "prices are down." CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted that inflation data released on the morning of Trump's December 17 speech showed that "average consumer prices were 2.7% higher in December than they were a year prior and 0.3% higher than they were in November."
Trump also used his primetime speech to hail the supposed successes of his tariff regime. But a report released Monday showed that US consumers and businesses, not foreign exporters, are shouldering nearly all of the burden of the White House's import taxes.
"Despite President Trump’s claims that 2025 was the 'greatest first year in history' for an American president, Americans’ attitudes about their economic security and the latest economic data say otherwise," experts at the Center for American Progress wrote Tuesday. "With increased costs of everyday items due to tariffs and fewer job opportunities, families are feeling the direct impacts of the Trump administration’s harmful economic policies."
"Every dollar of tariff revenue represents a dollar extracted from American businesses and households."
President Donald Trump has long insisted, in the face of decades of research by economists, that foreign producers are the only ones who are paying for his tariffs on imported goods.
However, a major new study released Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, an economic think tank based in Germany, shows that US businesses and consumers are shouldering the burden for the vast majority of Trump's tariffs.
After examining more than 25 million shipment records of goods imported to the US last year, the institute found that foreign exporters only absorbed 4% of the $200 billion in tariff payments, with the remaining 96% being passed on to US importers and consumers.
"This finding has profound implications," the study explains. "If foreign exporters do not reduce their prices in response to tariffs, then the entire burden of the tariff falls on US buyers. The tariff functions not as a tax on foreign producers, but as a consumption tax on Americans. Every dollar of tariff revenue represents a dollar extracted from American businesses and households."
The study identifies several factors to explain why exporters did not slash their prices to remain competitive in the lucrative US market, including exporters shifting their sales to other markets where they will not face such high tariffs; firms not being able to shoulder the high price cut that would be needed to overcome the tariff rates set by the president; and companies not wanting to give Trump an incentive for further tariffs by rewarding US consumers with lower prices.
Julian Hinz, research director at the Kiel Institute and an author of the study, described the Trump tariffs as an "own goal" that has harmed Americans far more than it has harmed foreigners.
"The claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth," explained Hinz. "The data show the opposite: Americans are footing the bill."
The Kiel Institute study came out two days after Trump vowed to slap even more tariffs on European countries opposed to his efforts to take over Greenland.
In an analysis published Monday, economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) said that the latest Trump tariffs on Europe amounted to a "$75 billion tax increase" in an attempt to fulfill the president's "demented dreams" of taking over the self-governing Danish territory.
"Well over 90% of the cost of a Trump tariff is borne by consumers or importers in the United States, not by the exporting countries," Baker contended. "When Trump starts yelling 'tariff, tariff, tariff,' he is yelling 'tax, tax, tax,' and we’re the ones paying it. And $75 billion is not trivial. It’s 1% of the budget, more than twice the cost of the enhanced premiums for Obamacare policies that Trump says we can’t afford."
"Europe should respond to Trump’s blackmail with targeted measures aimed not at American consumers, but at American billionaires," wrote Gabriel Zucman.
The leading French economist Gabriel Zucman is urging European governments to inflict financial pain on American billionaires in response to US President Donald Trump's effort to seize control of Greenland, a mineral-rich island that some of Trump's rich campaign donors see as a potentially massive profit opportunity.
"Europe should respond to Trump’s blackmail with targeted measures aimed not at American consumers, but at American billionaires," Zucman wrote in a post on his Substack. "Access to the European market—by billionaires and the companies they own—should be made conditional on paying a wealth tax: in effect, a tariff for oligarchs. If Elon Musk, for example, wants to keep selling Teslas in Europe, he should have to pay it. If he refuses, Tesla would lose access to the European market."
Zucman outlined his proposal after Trump threatened over the weekend to hit France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland with tariffs up to 25% if they don't drop their opposition to the US president's demand for "the complete and total purchase of Greenland," an autonomous territory of Denmark.
The targeted countries are currently weighing retaliatory tariffs and other potential responses to Trump's threat.
Zucman, a renowned expert on global inequality, argued that while existing mechanisms such as the anti-coercion instrument known as Europe's trade "bazooka" can be useful, "anti-oligarchic protectionism has a decisive advantage: It opens a two-front struggle against Trump, at home and abroad."
"By targeting oligarchic wealth rather than national pride," Zucman wrote, "Europe can blunt Trump’s ability to mobilize nationalist resentment and rally part of the American public behind his imperial agenda."
Trump's proposed Greenland takeover is widely opposed by the island's population and US voters. But as journalist Casey Michel wrote for The New Republic last week, there is one key constituency that stands to benefit massively from a US takeover of the mineral-rich territory: American oligarchs, including some of Trump's top campaign donors.
"Ranging from tech moguls to fossil fuel company heads, all of these figures and forces have invested in mining and extraction companies across the island—and all stand to profit if only they can cut out any pesky Danish or Greenlandic authorities from regulating or restraining their operations," wrote Michel. "The figures behind the curtain are by no means obscure. KoBold Metals, a mining outfit helping lead Greenland’s 'modern gold rush,' has seen investments from figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and hedge funds like Andreessen Horowitz."
"Another company eyeing Greenland," Michel added, "is Critical Metals Corp, which is backed by the same hedge fund that Howard Lutnick, now Trump’s commerce secretary, spent years running."
"The vast fortunes of the sleaze buckets who put Trump into the White House and back his attack on democracy in the United States and around the world will suddenly be thrown into question."
Tariffs targeting such firms and the billionaires behind them, Zucman argued, would be the most effective way to penalize Trump's reckless behavior and deter him in the future.
"If imperialism is driven by oligarchic power, then oligarchic power must be confronted," Zucman wrote. "What are the alternatives? Doing nothing invites endless blackmail."
US economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, made the case for a similarly aggressive European response to Trump's economic warfare.
"European countries can announce that they will no longer honor US-owned patents and copyrights," Baker wrote Monday. "Putting US patents and copyrights on the line is a guaranteed attention grabber. The vast fortunes of the sleaze buckets who put Trump into the White House and back his attack on democracy in the United States and around the world will suddenly be thrown into question."
"The key point is that European countries, by opting to not respect US patents and copyrights, have an incredibly powerful weapon to use against Donald Trump and his rich supporters," Baker added. "The time has come for them to go nuclear."