Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., used to stand at the left extreme of the Democratic Party. Now he’s in the middle.
After the primary victories by Ben Jealous in Maryland, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, some Democrats understandably feel a growing need to deny the obvious truth that the party is becoming socialist. Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi, two far-left senior congresswomen from California, both recently denied that theirs is a socialist party. But that’s becoming a hard fiction to uphold. And the two of them are indistinguishable from standard socialists elsewhere in the world.
Ocasio-Cortez and many Democratic nominees around the country are literally from the ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America. These are brass-knuckle radicals who want class warfare and to constrict individual freedom in order to create their heaven on Earth.
They are gaining control over a major political party.
[Also read: Here’s everything wrong with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s delusional tax reform ideas]
Go back just two years, to the Sanders-vs.-Hillary Clinton primary to see how things have moved.
Sanders’ pipe-dream policy proposal in the 2016 campaign was a single-payer plan he called “Medicare for all.” Today, a majority of the House Democratic caucus supports the idea enough to have co-sponsored “Medicare for all” legislation. So do 15 Senate Democrats, including presidential candidates Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
That’s why the Mercatus Center’s new study about the costs of single payer is so eye-catching. Sanders’ bill would add $32 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years, the free-market think tank found. Doubling taxes on corporations and individuals wouldn’t cover that cost.
That $32 trillion is, moreover, almost certainly too conservative an estimate. It comes in so low only because it grants Sanders’ dubious assumption that Uncle Sam could make healthcare dramatically cheaper. The spending assumptions in this paper would bring Medicare’s payments to hospitals below the hospitals’ cost of providing care, leaving us to wonder how Sanders would prop up these underfunded hospitals.
In olden times, Democrats didn’t have answers to these sorts of difficult questions. But since their socialist takeover, it’s easier. Their answer is to smash the current system.
“Medicare for all” isn’t intended to fix the current economic system but to be a first step in replacing our free economy with one run by Washington.
Debating “Medicare for all,” America’s socialists claim, would provide a chance for “a strategic conversation for democratic socialists because it provides a concrete example of how capitalism is incapable of providing for the basic needs of working people.”
It’s worth noting the use of the phrase “democratic socialism,” which implies that it is something different from socialism per se. In truth, socialism always negates the noun that its proponents say it only modifies. It would increasingly negate democracy and make this country less free.
[More: The disastrous ‘Medicare for All’ question every Democrat must answer]
That is, indeed, part of the purpose. Socialism is intended to undermine the idea of private property and free enterprise. The Democratic Socialists of America’s website says, Medicare for all “advances our struggle by heightening class conflict, beating back capital, and empowering the working class to make further democratic socialist demands.”
That rhetoric, straight from Karl Marx, is the motive cause of the Democratic Party’s most prominent policy proposal. The purpose is to turn Americans against each other, and to destabilize the healthcare system. If you harm private hospitals and doctors’ offices through this scheme, and you will, socialists have a solution for that too, which involves more spending, which in turn requires more taxes, which heightens class conflict. Win-win-win!
Some Republicans relish this hard tack left by Democrats, assuming it is political suicide. They shouldn’t. The scary part is that socialism can be popular. It offers people free stuff while dissembling about the cost. The Mercatus study shows how much those costs would be. And the socialists’ own rhetoric shows that the cost of their agenda is much greater than just a few trillion dollars.
