Most democrats want a huge cradle to grave nanny system run by a huge gov't bureaucracy, but that requires very high, broad-based taxes ala Sweden that the American taxpayers do not want. So, they try to implement as much of that nanny state as they can at every opportunity, without actually paying for it. They use gimmicks such as passing legislation that requires 10 years of taxes but only 3 years of benefits and tell us it's paid for when it really isn't. That's because it's politically hard to take back any benefits once they are established, and so we end up pushing the tax burden further and further out or we add to the national debt. Or some combination of the two. And nobody seems to care about the enormous problem that future generations will have to deal with, namely servicing that debt. It ain't so bad when interest rates are near zero, but once those rates start to climb as they are now, we'll begin to see enormous interest payments approaching a trillion dollars a year just to pay the interest.
So, IMHO we are inching closer to a democratic socialist state, or am I to assume that at some point the socialists will say okay, that's enough? The gov't is big enough, no need to get any bigger? Yeah, I think not, there's always something more that the democrats will want to spend money on and create a new program to administer. We may not end up with a pure socialist state where the gov't actually owns the means of production, but they sure as hell will be able to control it to their satisfaction, and that IS socialism.
