Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had a surprising answer when he was pressed on how to pay for his socialist policies — he said Americans would be “delighted” to pay more in taxes.

Sanders was speaking to Anderson Cooper on CNN when he made the comments about how Americans would be delighted to pay more taxes to make healthcare a ‘human right’.

“Do enough Americans know what you mean by [socialism] and what that actually looks like?” Cooper asked.

“Look, what we have to understand,” said Sanders, “for example, just for example, the United States is the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people, as a right. In many countries in Europe, Germany for one, you go to college, and the cost of college is zero. I think in Finland they actually pay you to go to college.

“In most of the countries around the world the level of income and wealth inequality,” he continued, “which in the United States today is worse than at any time since the 1920s with three families owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, that level of income and wealth inequality is much less severe than it is right here in the United States.”

Cooper pointed out that individual personal taxes in those countries are much higher than in the U.S.

“Yeah but I suspect people in this country would be delighted to pay more in taxes, if they had comprehensive healthcare as a human right!” Sanders responded

Sen. Bernie Sanders has been a long standing promoter of ‘free’ healthcare at the cost of tax payers. According to The Washington Examiner, Sanders has an ambitious plan to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system would also grant coverage to those residing in the country illegally.

The Vermont lawmaker’s new bill states that “every individual who is a resident of the United States is entitled to benefits for health care services.” The Secretary of Health and Human Services would “promulgate a rule that provides criteria for determining residency for eligibility purposes under this Act.”

Even if an individual is not covered under a broad definition of “residency” by the secretary of HHS, the federal government can take steps “to ensure that every person in the United States has access to health care.”

Bernie Sanders, who first coined the term Medicare-for-all to describe his single-payer legislation, is more than eager to accept the socialist label, unlike many of his Democratic colleagues.

Sanders says supporting Medicare-for-all makes him a ‘socialist.’

“Democratic socialism means to me requiring and achieving political and economic freedom in every community in this country.” Sanders said in a 45-minute address at George Washington University, in which he invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. and former president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Sanders said he understood he would face “massive attacks from those who attempt to use the world ‘socialism’ as a slur,” my Washington Post colleague Sean Sullivan reports. Sanders added: “I have faced and overcome these attacks for decades. And I am not the only one.”

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