If you didn\u2019t believe that before, you certainly should now. Sanders last week gave a powerful speech at George Washington University defending his identity as a \u201cdemocratic socialist\u201d and endorsing Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s 1944 promise to create an \u201ceconomic bill of rights.\u201d Roosevelt died before he could make good on that.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal,\u201d Sanders said. Meanwhile, he expects \u201cmassive attacks\u201d from those who attempt to use the word \u201csocialism as a slur.\u201d Sanders is surely right to object to this: We long ago passed the threshold of having a socialist society that reorders its spending to help those who we think deserve help.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true that Sanders\u2019 socialism doesn\u2019t fit the traditional definition, which is government ownership of the \u201cmeans of production\u201d and major corporations. But we do already have a vast system of \u201centitlements\u201d \u2013 Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and the like \u2013 that eventually subsidizes most Americans. At any one moment, roughly half of U.S. households receive benefits, reports Danilo Trisi of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Over time, the proportion rises.<\/p>\n
We are all socialists now, as I wrote a few weeks ago. But we deny this obvious reality and stigmatize socialism as an alien phenomenon that is automatically un-American.<\/p>\n
In a recent post on his blog, The Conversable Economist, Timothy Taylor made a similar point. \u201cI\u2019ve been coming around to the belief that most modern arguments over \u2018socialism\u2019 are a waste of time, because the content of the term has become so nebulous,\u201d he wrote. Many \u201c\u2019socialists\u2019 are really just saying that they would like to have government play a more active role in providing various benefits to workers and the poor, along with additional environmental protection.\u201d<\/p>\n
This may explain why support for socialism is surprisingly strong. Gallup periodically asks whether Americans think socialism is a \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d thing. Earlier this year, 43% said a good thing, 51% a bad thing, reported Taylor. In 1942, the responses were 25% a good thing and 40% a bad thing (most of the remainder had no opinion).<\/p>\n
What should count are actual proposals, not the associated slogans and soundbites. Not unexpectedly, Sanders\u2019 economic vision is sweeping. \u201cWe must take the next step forward and guarantee every man, woman and child in our country basic economic rights,\u201d he said in his speech. These include, in his words:<\/p>\n
The right to quality health care<\/em>The right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society<\/em>The right to a good job that pays a living wage<\/em>The right to affordable housing<\/em>The right to a secure retirement<\/em>The right to a clean environment<\/em>\u201cWe must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights,\u201d he added. \u201cThat is what I mean by democratic socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n All these are worthy goals \u2013 and utopian. Inevitably, they raise practical and philosophical questions.<\/p>\n The practical issues involve costs, which are bound to be large. More spending would add to budgets that, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, are already running annual deficits of $1 trillion, equal to roughly 4% of gross domestic product. Moreover, the CBO projections may be conservative, because they assume slowdowns in discretionary spending that may not occur.<\/p>\n The philosophic questions revolve around \u201crights,\u201d which is how Sanders frames his proposals. A \u201cright\u201d is open-ended. How much more medical care is needed? How clean does a clean environment have to be? How much education is justified? Because Sanders casts his proposals as \u201crights,\u201d they may disappoint both supporters and opponents \u2013 being too stingy for supporters and too generous for opponents.<\/p>\n Listening to Sanders\u2019 speech, it was almost possible to imagine him during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Because the crisis then was mostly economic, virtually all of Sanders\u2019 major proposals today deal with economics. In his talk, Sanders barely mentioned climate change, foreign policy or defense spending. (His campaign website contains some discussion of these issues.)<\/p>\n This is not the 1930s. For better or for worse, we have moved on. Society is aging with pervasive consequences for most Americans. Economic growth has slowed. The world has become more hostile. We need to engage with these realities. The trouble is that our leaders are ill-prepared to adopt this sort of hyper-honesty. We cannot prepare for the future if we are stuck in the past.<\/p>\n Robert Samuelson is a columnist for The Washington Post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" you didn\u2019t believe that before, you certainly should now. Sanders last week gave a powerful speech at George Washington University defending his identity as a \u201cdemocratic socialist\u201d and endorsing Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s 1944 promise to create an \u201ceconomic bill of rights.\u201d Roosevelt died before he could make good on that. \u201cWe must take up the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5758,6174],"tags":[],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-93344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columnists","category-robert-samuelson"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93344"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=93344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}