Voice of socialism refuses to die…

Alas! After all the fight against the evil empire i.e. socialism now it appeared suddenly in the race to white house. Ronald Reagan must be moving uncomfortably in his grave. That too When elections in countries of Latin America appear to go back from the Path of the Left . An irony UN paralleled. Wether Senator Bernie Sanders succeeds in his efforts or not he has already sent ripples down the elite of US. While it’s intensity may be gauged from the story given below from The wall Street journal we may question the great advocates of private mantra or LPG In the country where the poor and lower middle classes out number the rich by many times .
Make no mistake Sanders is no socialist but his arguments apply to us much more…

 

PORTSMOUTH, N.H.—Then-Sen. Barack Obama had to spend precious days at the close of his 2008 presidential campaign to defend against charges of socialism after he casually suggested his tax plan would “spread the wealth around.”

Today, seeking the same job in the same party, Sen. Bernie Sanders proudly wears the democratic socialist label and touts a sweeping plan designed to spread the wealth. He calls for a “political revolution” to vastly expand the government’s role in American life and sharply cut the power of Wall Street and the role of money in politics. And he draws voters too young to care about socialism’s Cold War stigma and who came of age during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Mr. Sanders, so liberal he resisted joining the Democratic Party for decades, hasn’t changed his views since his first election to office 35 years ago. Yet he now represents a substantial swath of his party’s left flank.

What has changed is the Democratic Party, whose voters have moved to the left over the course of both Republican and Democratic administrations, and, like the Republican Party, are responding to a rising populist tide.

A major shift
Mr. Sanders’s proposals amount to a more significant expansion of government than any viable presidential candidate has proposed in years, supported by more new spending than many Democrats would like.

Three ideas in particular—on Social Security, college subsidies and health care—show how his thinking and the party’s most liberal voters have aligned.

On Social Security, Mr. Sanders, age 74, wants to increase benefits for everyone, a position barely discussed a few years ago, as most Democrats focused on maintaining the program’s long-term solvency and defending it from Republican privatization proposals.

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On college, he proposes a $750 billion program to make tuition free at all public colleges and universities—paid for by a new tax on financial transactions.

And on health care, Mr. Sanders wants to go far beyond the Affordable Care Act by replacing private insurance companies with government-run coverage. Here, he speaks for many liberals who have long supported a universal, single-payer health-care system but haven’t seriously pushed it in years.

All three proposals would require congressional approval, considered highly unlikely with the current GOP majority. Mr. Sanders says a political revolution is needed to pressure lawmakers.

Socialism appears to carry far less of a stigma than it once did, particularly among young people who form the base of Mr. Sanders’s support. A Boston Globe poll of Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire released Saturday found 31% said the term “socialist” described them; among those ages 17 to 34, it was just over half.

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In the Iowa caucuses, voters under age 30 supported Mr. Sanders over rival Hillary Clinton, 84% to 14%.

Growth of the party’s left wing has taken a toll on Mrs. Clinton, who for years was tagged as an ultra-liberal but must now prove her credentials as a progressive and explain her long ties to Wall Street. Mrs. Clinton narrowly won the Iowa caucuses last week, and now trails in polls ahead of the primary Tuesday in New Hampshire, which borders Mr. Sanders’s home state of Vermont. Nationally, she is first in polls.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign proposals are less sweeping and less expensive, though she argues they are more effective and far more realistic in an era of wide ideological divisions.

Mr. Sanders’s surprising success—and Mrs. Clinton’s travails—highlight how far the party has moved leftward since her husband, former President Bill Clinton, steered it to the center in the early 1990s.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, has veered to the right.

ENLARGE
Polls illustrate the shift in both parties. In 1990, just 13% of Democrats called themselves “very liberal,” while 12% of Republicans identified as “very conservative,” according to Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling. By last year the number was 26% for Democrats and 29% for Republicans.

When Mr. Clinton was elected president in 1992, Democrats were coming off 12 years of Republican control of the White House, and many in the party were determined to show voters they were tough on crime, friendly to business, concerned about the federal budget and careful with taxpayer money. Mr. Clinton was chief spokesman for the party’s centrist agenda.

“It was considered good politics for Democrats to show people on Wall Street approved of their economic plans,” said Peter Beinart, who has studied the evolution of the Democratic Party at the City University of New York. “In the 1990s, Wall Street had a lot of prestige.”

President George W. Bush’s election in 2000 sparked a revival of the Democratic Party’s left wing: His tax plan, for example, yielded significant cuts for the wealthy, and, in 2002, he won congressional approval to invade Iraq.

Both measures passed with the help of Democratic lawmakers, stirring fury among liberal Democrats, who found new outlets for their anger—from the liberal blog Daily Kos and MoveOn.org to the presidential campaign of Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who ran in 2004 against the war and the tax cuts.

The seeds of a progressive movement inside the party appeared to flower with Mr. Obama’s 2008 election, but many liberals soon chafed. On health care, Mr. Obama failed to secure a government-run option to compete with private insurance companies in the new insurance marketplaces, they complained. The president enraged many liberals when he suggested he was willing to cut Social Security benefits to win a grand budget bargain in 2011.

Such swelling voices served as the backdrop for Mr. Sanders’s suggestion that a candidate on the left challenge Mr. Obama in the 2012 election.

“There are millions of Americans who are deeply disappointed in the president; who believe that, with regard to Social Security and a number of other issues, he said one thing as a candidate and is doing something very much else as a president,” Mr. Sanders told a radio interviewer in 2011.

The party was also becoming more liberal as conservative Democrats were defeated or retired, and Republican lawmakers took hold of the South. The shift left the Democratic base concentrated in the Northeast, upper Midwest and West Coast, reliant on a more liberal voting bloc compared with the working-class white voters who once formed an important party foundation.

Anger mounted during the Obama years over growing income inequality, particularly after Wall Street bailouts rescued some of the country’s richest people while many Americans struggled financially in a tepid job market.

Statistics explain voter fury. The top 3% of households had more than twice as much wealth in 2013 as the bottom 90% put together, according to the Federal Reserve. The top 400 taxpayers’ share of U.S. income doubled in two decades, according to the Internal Revenue Service. While top incomes rose, every other group was stagnant.

Much like the tea party, which grew out of anger on the political right over Wall Street bailouts, anger on the left surfaced in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. The movement fizzled, but not before raising income inequality to national debate.

In 2011, Elizabeth Warren, a formerly obscure Harvard bankruptcy professor, became a national sensation on the left by challenging wealthy Americans to recognize that public investment—in roads and education, for example—helped enable their success. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” she said, in an oft-repeated quote.

Ms. Warren was elected to the Senate in 2012, and her supporters later urged her to run for president in 2016. She declined, but Mr. Sanders picked up many of her supporters and then some.

The Occupy Wall Street movement opened the door for Sen. Warren, who paved the way for Sen. Sanders, said Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the New School in New York, who has studied the movement.

“Here’s a guy who owns the label of socialist. It’s inconceivable that a major candidate would have done that prior to Occupy,” Mr. Varon said. “Occupy gave a new prestige to a set of ideas that were normally considered quite marginal.”

As a candidate, Mr. Sanders’s proposals would cost some $17 trillion over 10 years, according to his campaign, which amounts to a one-third increase in the total size of government and the largest peacetime expansion in modern U.S. history.

‘Medicare for all’
His most expensive proposal, about $1.4 trillion annually, is for a “Medicare for all” government-financed health care system, which he said was needed to ensure all Americans have affordable health coverage and to control costs. His plan would disconnect health insurance from employment; businesses and individuals would no longer pay premiums.

Mr. Sanders said he would pay for the plan with a new 6.2% payroll tax on employers, a 2.2% income tax on all taxpayers and new taxes on high-income households. Under Mr. Sanders’s plan, the top federal income-tax rate would exceed 50% for the first time since 1980.

The last Democratic presidential candidate to propose a single-payer health care program was California Gov. Jerry Brown in 1992. Yet support for the idea dates back decades. More than 60 House Democrats currently back single-payer legislation.

Social Security provides way too little for retirement, Mr. Sanders said, citing elderly people trying to get by on payments of $12,000 or so a year. He would increase benefits and pay for them, he said, applying the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax—paid by employers and employees—on income over $250,000. The tax is currently applied only to the first $118,500 of wages.

His proposal would have been jarring until recently. Democrats opposed GOP efforts to privatize the program, but few talked about expanding the program. Democrats focused on the issue typically worried about the program’s long-term shortfall, and hoped for a bipartisan agreement to bolster the program, likely a combination of higher taxes and reduced benefits.

Mr. Obama proposed a small benefit cut during the 2011 budget negotiations, prompting an outcry from the left. The idea sank, but liberals concluded their best defense against cuts was a good offense: They began advocating for benefit increases.

Now, a group favoring expanded benefits counts 141 Democratic House members supporting their cause, and, in the Senate, 42 Democrats voted for a nonbinding resolution calling for a “sustainable expansion of benefits.”

Mrs. Clinton has long said she supported increased benefits for the poorest seniors. But on Friday, Mr. Sanders pressured Mrs. Clinton to say whether she would promise not to cut the program. In response, she tweeted, “I won’t cut Social Security. As always, I’ll expand it, & I’ll defend it.”

Mr. Sanders’s proposal to eliminate tuition at public colleges has gained steam at a time when many students face heavy debt loads—now approaching $1.3 trillion, nationally—and state budget cuts to higher education have driven up tuition. The recession prompted many people to go back to school, and many emerged with heavy payments and few prospects.

As recently as 2012, Mr. Obama proposed more modest assistance to college students: lowering rates on federal loans, which he pushed among younger voters during his re-election campaign. Last year, he proposed tuition-free community college, an idea that died in Congress.

Liberal groups pitched something bolder: debt-free four-year college, which charged families only what they could afford. Mrs. Clinton backed that idea, but Mr. Sanders took it further and proposed free college altogether. Public college should be free, he said, like high school is.

“In the last 30 years, when people say to me, ‘Bernie you’re coming up with these ambitious ideas. How can you afford them?’” Mr. Sanders told the crowd at a campaign rally Sunday. “The answer is in the last 30 years, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the pockets of working families to the top 1/10th of 1%. And we can afford these programs because we’re going to transfer some of that wealth back.”