Buttigieg, Biden and Sanders duel in Democratic front-runner’s TV debate
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Democratic White House front-runners Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg together with seven other candidates took to the stage in Miami, Florida, to impress voters ahead of next year’s election in a televised debate.
This was the second debate this week. Sparks flew in the first debate with 10 other Democrats on Wednesday night.
The crowd of contenders will be winnowed until a winner is picked at the party convention in July next year.
He or she will face the Republican president in the November 2020 election.
As the debate began, Sanders confirmed he would raise taxes on American working families, but said they would end up paying less overall because of savings on healthcare.
Biden pledged instead to eliminate President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy.
Sanders pilloried the president as “a pathological liar and a racist”.
Front-runner Joe Biden has come under ferocious attack for his record on race in a televised debate with nine rivals.
Senator Kamala Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, assailed him for touting his past work with racist senators and having once opposed a policy to foster diversity in schools.
He said she had “mischaracterised” his position, insisting he had entered politics to champion civil rights.
The candidates were asked which relationship with a foreign country they would fix if elected.
In a moment of brevity, Buttigieg said: “We have no idea which of our most important allies he will have pissed off worse between now and then, but what we know is our relationship with the entire world needs to change.”
When asked how he would handle China, Buttigieg said it’s a serious challenge. He criticized Trump’s tariffs as being a tax on Americans and said finding a solution is about more than the price of a dishwasher, a familiar refrain from his campaign.
He said he lives in the industrial Midwest and he knows farmers are hurting and he says Americans are paying $800 more per year due to tariffs.
He said China is investing in technology to perfect its dictatorship and is running circles around the U.S. in terms of creating artificial intelligence, seeming to suggest the U.S. needs to think about matching its economic rival in technology.
