Bernie Sanders is eying another run at the Presidency in 2020.
He is centering his campaign on his single payer health care scheme.
But a devastating video from his past just sent his hopes crashing and burning before the campaign even begins.
Recently, Bernie Sanders unveiled his “Medicaid for all” legislation.
This would cement the United States government’s complete control over Americans health care.
His legislation came with no price tag and no means to pay for it.
One person knows just how dangerous government run health care is to nation’s fiscal stability.
And it’s none other than Bernie Sanders.
A video recently surfaced from 1987 when Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
In the video, he states his support for Medicaid for all, but warns that it would bankrupt America.
The Daily Caller reports:
In fact, in 1987, when Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, VT, he guessed that a medicaid-for-all system would “bankrupt the nation.”
Sanders was still in favor of universal access to care, stating on his show “Bernie Speaks with the Community” that he “want[s] to guarantee that all people have access to healthcare as you do in Canada.”
However, he didn’t seem to think the United States could take on the financial burden.
“But I think what we understand is that unless we change the funding system and the control mechanism in this country to do that,” he said. “For example, if we expanded Medicaid [to] everybody. Give everybody a Medicaid card – we would be spending such an astronomical sum of money that, you know, we would bankrupt the nation.”
You can watch the video below.
During the campaign when Sanders proposed government run health care, it was estimated to cost $32 trillion.
If the price tag wasn’t enough to send America’s fiscal fortune spiraling down the drain, the number of tax increases required to fund this scheme would wreck whatever was left of the economy.
After introducing the legislation – which did not include any mechanism to pay for it – Sanders’ office released a white paper with a number of schemes to soak up taxpayer’s dollars.
The Washington Post reports:
“The taxes themselves would fall on both employers and employees. Sanders floats the idea of a 7.5 percent tax on employers — who would no longer be footing a bill for employee health care — with one workaround. “As workers shift into the new system, employers will be required to pay either 75 percent of what they are currently paying for health care costs for each of their employees who enroll in Medicare for All, or the 7.5 percent payroll tax, whichever is higher,” he writes.
Another tax, of 4 percent, would hit individuals, on the theory that they would end up saving money relative to the cost of premiums. “A typical family of four earning $50,000, after taking the standard deduction, would pay a 4 percent income-based premium to fund Medicare for All — just $844 a year — saving that family over $4,400 a year,” writes Sanders. Families below the poverty line would pay no net new tax.
The next big slice of funding: higher tax rates on the very wealthy. Income less than $250,000 would be taxed at current rates; income higher than that would be hit harder, on an upward sliding scale, ending at a 52 percent tax on income over $10 million. (The highest income tax rate has not cracked 50 percent since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan slashed the top rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. It is currently 39.6 percent.)
The wealthy would not be done paying after that. Sanders imagines a tax on financial institutions worth more than $50 billion, a one-time tax on offshore profits (an idea that is continually floated then sunk in tax reform negotiations), a higher estate tax (topping out at 55 percent), and a 1 percent wealth tax on the richest 0.1 percent of households.”
The legislation is political suicide in a general election.
But since the base of the Democrat Party has shifted so far left, 2020 hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris quickly signed on to Sanders’ proposal.
That just means in 2020 the Democrats will be running on a platform of tens of trillions of dollars in tax and spending increases.
This is political doom and Bernie Sanders admitted such in 1987 and Democrats will never be able to run away from this video.
