For
decades, the Democratic Party has been steadily moving away from its
roots as America’s self-proclaimed champion of the middle class, instead
choosing to embrace radical identity politics and a
socialist agenda. Democrats are quickly becoming the party of Karl Marx and Che Guevara, not John Kennedy.
The rise of the
far left
in the Democratic Party has perhaps never been more evident than since
Democrats recaptured the House of Representatives in the November 2018
midterm elections. The following are just some of the most socialistic
and radical plans now garnering significant support among Democrats in
Congress.
Government-run, single-payer health care.
Rep.
John Yarmouth, D-Ky., the chairman of the powerful House Budget
Committee, recently issued a request to the Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) to conduct an analysis of the costs of transforming the United
States’ current health insurance system into a
government-run, single-payer model
– the plan embraced by Senators Cory Booker, D-N.J., Elizabeth Warren,
D-Mass., and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Yarmouth’s
request is a signal that Democrats are in the early stages of preparing
for a future vote on single-payer legislation.
AMERICA'S PROGRESSIVES ARE SO BUSY EXTOLLING VIRTUES OF SOCIALISM THAT THEY WANT YOU TO IGNORE THIS
A single-payer program in line with Sen. Sanders’
“Medicare for All”
proposal would cost $32 trillion in its first 10 years, according to an
analysis by the Mercatus Center – an amount so high Mercatus estimates
that doubling existing individual and corporate taxes wouldn’t be enough
to cover the costs.
Not only would putting the government in
charge of health care cost trillions of dollars, but it would also force
Americans to endure many of the same problems plaguing government-run
health care models around the world, including long wait times for
patients and rationing of care. The Fraser Institute reports that
patients in Canada, which has a single-payer health care model, who
require “medically necessary elective orthopedic surgery” wait on
average 41.7 weeks – about 10 months – before receiving treatment.
Patients requiring elective neurosurgery, including many patients who
have brain tumors, wait 32.9 weeks.
If Democrats have it their
way, Americans will be subjected to similar problems, and millions of
people will inevitably suffer as a result.
The elimination of all fossil fuels; socialized energy.
One of the Democrats’ most controversial and destructive proposals is newly-elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y.,
“Green New Deal.”
This far-reaching plan would eliminate all fossil fuels by 2030,
including from agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and the
entire electric grid.
Ending the fossil-fuel industry would
potentially destroy millions of jobs and require an unprecedented
investment in expensive and unreliable renewable energy sources like
wind and solar power generation. Even worse, because wind and solar cost
two to five times more than existing conventional energy sources,
requiring huge sectors of the economy to rely on these renewables would
increase the cost of all goods and services and drive countless
businesses out of the country.
The
“Green New Deal”
doesn’t stop there, however. It would also socialize much of the
newly-created renewable energy industry and require “upgrades” to nearly
every building in the country – a provision that would likely cost
trillions of dollars and insert the federal government into every
American’s home.
Massive tax increases.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has called for increasing the top marginal tax rate for some wealthy Americans to as high as
70 percent.
If enacted, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist says it
would be the highest tax rate in the industrialized world.
Democrats
have also proposed a dramatic increase to America’s corporate tax rate.
Rep. Yarmouth has said he favors raising the corporate rate from 21
percent to 28 percent – a 33 percent increase. This would be one of the
largest corporate tax hikes in recent history, and it would roll back
much of the reduction to the corporate tax rate passed by Republicans
and President Donald Trump as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
Those tax cuts, coupled with the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks, have spurred
remarkable economic growth
in the United States. According to data from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, more than 2.8 million full-time jobs were created from
January 2018 to December 2018 – 688,000 more than the number of jobs
created during the same period in 2017.
Increasing tax rates on
corporations would likely cause a substantial economic slowdown and
might even cause corporations that have expanded their operations to lay
off newly-hired workers.
Abolishing the electoral college.
Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., introduced legislation to create a constitutional amendment that would
eliminate the electoral college
system and replace it with a model based entirely on the outcome of the
national popular vote. (Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore
(2000) and Hillary Clinton (2016) both won the popular vote but lost the
presidential election because their challengers won more electoral
college votes.)
The electoral college system for electing
presidents is an essential part of our federalist system of government
and was a key component to the passage of the Constitution in 1787. The
electoral college enhances the power of voters in smaller states.
Without the electoral college, voters in a handful of highly populated
states would have significantly more power to determine the outcome of
every presidential election, which is exactly what Democrats want. About
three in 10 votes cast in the 2016 election occurred in just seven
Democratic-leaning states: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New
Jersey, New York, Virginia and Washington State.
If the electoral
college is abolished, voters in much of the Midwest, South and Mountain
West regions – especially in rural areas – will be ignored in future
presidential elections.
Together,
these proposals represent a remarkable shift toward socialism and the
centralization of power, and away from the principles that have made the
United States the most prosperous, successful nation in human history:
individual liberty and free markets.
Americans everywhere must
stand against these radical ideas. If we don’t, the United States will,
over the next few decades, begin to look increasingly more like the
Soviet Union and less like the country created by our Founding Fathers.