As Democrats score on healthcare, the Council of Economic Advisers raises the spectre of Marx, Sanders and Swedish working mothers making you pay more for your pickup truck

History repeats itself, observed Karl Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

In the 1950s the “red scare” warned of communists sympathetic to the Soviet Union lurking around every corner of the US. On Tuesday, the White House was back at it, this time raising the spectre of Marx, Bernie Sanders and working mothers in Sweden.

A pre-election report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers sounds the alarm: “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth [May 1818], socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the electorate.”

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The paper also just happens to be “coincident” with the 2018 midterm elections. It does not take a wild leap of imagination to foresee a feedback loop in which the Fox News host Sean Hannity cites the study as evidence of socialism posing an existential threat, after which Donald Trump talks and tweets about the issue.

Entitled Opportunity Costs of Socialism, the report struck many observers as an attempt by Republicans to neutralise what could be the winning issue for Democrats – healthcare – cloaked in academese about Das Kapital and the follies of “Maoist China, Cuba, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)”.

Sanders, a Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist, has proposed “Medicare for All”, a single-payer healthcare system that could cost about $32.6tn over a decade. Democratic candidates for the House are backing this approach in just over half the races they are contesting, according to a survey reported by USA Today.

Overall, however, the bulk of the Democratic party remains firmly to the right of Labour in the UK and its counterparts in the rest of Europe. The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, declared last year: “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”

Sprinkled with a seasoning of familiar Marxist terminology, the document says: “The proposed solutions include single-payer systems, high tax rates (‘from each according to his ability’), and public policies that hand out much of the Nation’s goods and services ‘free’ of charge (‘to each according to his needs’).”

It claims that if Medicare for All “were financed through higher taxes, GDP would fall by 9%, or about $7,000 per person in 2022”.

An executive summary of the report approvingly quotes the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as saying, “Socialist governments … always run out of other people’s money,” and thus the way to prosperity is for the state to give “the people more choice to spend their own money in their own way”.

Authoritarian communist regimes also seized control of farming that led to substantially less food production and tens of millions of deaths by starvation, it continues. The current crisis in Venezuela proves that the distortions persist even in democratic and industrialised countries, the report says. “They produce less rather than more.”

The paper also has a dig at Nordic countries often cited approvingly by many on the left as socialist success stories. First, it says, Nordic countries’ policies are not really socialism as economists define it. Second, “living standards in the Nordic countries are at least 15% lower than in the United States”. And if the US had adopted Nordic-style policies from the 1970s, “its real GDP would decline by at least 19% in the long run, or about $11,000 per year for the average person”.

As for Nordic countries’ celebrated childcare provisions, the report quotes the economist Sherwin Rosen on Sweden where “a large fraction of women work in the public sector to take care of the children of other women who work in the public sector to care for the parents of the women who are looking after their children. If Swedish women take care of each other’s parents in exchange for taking care of each other’s children, how much additional real output comes of it?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Ford Ranger under socialism. Is this really what you want? Photograph: Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images

The report also swivels from the horrors of Stalinism to the cost of a pickup truck. The Ford Ranger starts at $24,300 in the US, it notes, compared with about $40,500 in Finland. Owning and operating a pickup truck is also more pricey in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. It does not delve into a comparison of public transport networks or the impact on climate change.

In a conference call with reporters, Kevin Hassett, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, added an intriguing claim: “People of Nordic descent currently living in the US – it’s another way to think about it – have incomes about 30% above the average American, and therefore have incomes about 50% above the average of the people who are residents in their home country. And so if you leave Scandinavia and move to the US, then you can expect your income to be about 50% higher.”

Life expectancy in Sweden is 82.2, according to the World Bank. In the US it is 78.69.

The release met with a mixed response on Twitter. The not-for-profit advocacy organisation Public Citizen posted: “When the Trump administration undertakes pointless and intellectually embarrassing initiatives, we should be glad. Because it means they didn’t do something evil and of consequence.”

Scott Ferguson, an academic based in Tampa, Florida, posted: “The mere fact that the Council of Economic Advisers feels compelled to play defense against socialism‘s acknowledged ‘comeback’ is very, very good.”

Democrats on the campaign trail have found healthcare is the number one issue for many voters. The White House release follows a controversial opinion column by Trump that claimed the new wave of Democrat candidates are “radical socialists who want to model America’s economy after Venezuela”. It was widely denounced by factcheckers.

Michael Cornfield, an associate professor of political management at George Washington University in Washington, said: “Actually, I found the release intellectually respectable. I could see the report it summarizes as a source of good questions to put to Sanders and [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez. Of course, I can also see a print-out of the report being waved like a red flag at Trump rallies. The word ‘socialism’ reliably sets off sirens in right-of-centre brains.”

He added: “What’s conveniently left out of this formulation is that the vast majority of Democratic candidates this year are not socialists.”