Barack Obama Is A Socialist If……..–UPDATED

Forget Jeff Foxworthy, that’s too low-brow, Rethuglican humor for ya’ll. Enter the erudite Dr. Obama.

You might be a socialist…..

……if you believe in the redistribution of wealth. Obama said to a small business owner yesterday and Rachel Lucas reports:

“It’s not that I wanna punish your success, I just wanna make sure that everybody behind you, that they have a chance at success, too. I think we need to spread the wealth around.“

You might be a socialist…
……if you believe in “refundables”. Says Ace:

How does he intend to spread the wealth? By increasing the size of federal programs?

Well, that’s a start. But I’m afraid he’s going to spread it around more directly — by taking money away from people who pay taxes to directly give it to those who don’t pay taxes in the form of a “tax cut.”

A tax cut? For people who already don’t pay taxes? That’s not a tax cut, is it? That’s more like a… well, a government handout. It’s a welfare check.

Not so.

Obama prefers to call it “refundables.” Even though you’re not being “refunded” anything, you’re just being sent a thousand or two dollars from someone else’s tax payments.

Here’s a little Wiki for ya’ll who were deprived of a Harvard education and must use online references to educate yourself:

Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth into a small section of society who control capital, and creates an unequal society. All socialists advocate the creation of an egalitarian society, in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly, although there is considerable disagreement among socialists over how, and to what extent this could be achieved.[1]

What part of this definition does Barack Obama disagree with, actually? You see, when the government taxes a company disproportionately and redistributes the money made, it is taking profits of the company and essentially controlling how the money is spent. No doubt, the business owners have limited choices because they cannot choose how to spend the money they earn.

As I have written before, this government behavior punishes success. If it gets bad enough, people stop producing, hiring, and do business elsewhere. The POOR and WORKING CLASS people lose what jobs they have, suck more off the government teat, the government needs more tax revenue and creates an even more punitive business environment. See Michigan as socialism is stupid “Exhibit A”.

Leftists who protest at the socialist label are being obtuse. They know that all socialists are not the same, that it’s a broad category, and that Barack Obama certainly is not a Capitalism champion. So what is he, if not a socialist?

Says Investor’s Business Daily:

“I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
He certainly does, and his unguarded statement to a voter in a key swing state is socialist economics distilled to its simplest terms.

Eliminating small business capital gains taxes — whatever the details would be (and you can bet it would be a fraction of total private investment) — will not rescue the middle class from the job losses of a high-tax Obama administration planning to spend an extra $293 billion annually. It does, however, cunningly deaden charges that Obama is camouflaging a socialist agenda.

The other components of his so-called rescue, lovingly described by the New York Times as “proposals to spur new jobs, to give Americans penalty-free access to retirement savings to help them through the downturn, to urge a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and to lend money to strapped local and state governments” are worded to sound equally innocuous. But a close look tells another story.
His $3,000 income-tax credit for each new full-time employee hired by businesses is an obvious anti-outsourcing incentive likely to increase business costs, of which we can expect plenty more — of a directly punitive nature — in an Obama administration. He would replace the judgment of banks with that of the federal government regarding when or if to foreclose. And he wants the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to bail out spendthrift state and local governments.

And one thing that has been patently absurd is the whole 95% of people will get tax cuts. It makes no sense. Is Obama really saying that taking the money of the top 5% of American wage earners will make up for what is lost everywhere else? It makes for a good soundbite but it sounds crazy…and yet, people must believe it. The Wall Street Journal notes:

There’s another catch: Because Mr. Obama’s tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge “marginal” tax rate increase on low-income workers. The marginal tax rate refers to the rate on the next dollar of income earned. As the nearby chart illustrates, the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.

Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of “making work pay,” but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you’re a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year. One mystery — among many — of the McCain campaign is why it has allowed Mr. Obama’s 95% illusion to go unanswered.

The government controls the money. And when the government controls money, it controls the citizen. Their choices are limited. Their lives constrict to the size the government deems adequate. They are boiled like frogs. Socialists count on the fact that the average person will be swayed by the class warfare rhetoric and ignore the fine print.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” – Winston Churchill

Obama’s hubris is that he believes socialism just hasn’t been done “right”. Never mind that it never works no matter the iteration. He’s going to try anyway. We can’t say we didn’t know ahead of time.

UPDATED:

Maxed Out Mama lays it out as usual:

Keep in mind that incomes will be trending lower for the next couple of years, due to that little thingamabobble I call a “recession”. Median income is still around $50,000. American households earning less than $30,000 are about 29% of the total. Your subsidies and credits should be mostly aimed at this group. If you want to give 95% of Americans a tax break, that means you are going to be taxing the remaining 5% monumentally more, beginning with household incomes at around $175,000.

For all intents and purposes, raising taxes that much on this group is impossible. Let’s round that group to about 4.5 million, and say that’s equivalent to 9 million individuals. That 9 million individuals would collectively have to pay over 500 billion more in taxes to pay for the refundable portion to the lower brackets. A billion has 3 more zeros than a million, so (500 billion/9 million = 500,000,000,000/9,000,000 = $55,556 per such taxpayer. Needless to say, you are not going to be taxing a person making $175,000 an ADDITIONAL $55,000 if you expect this person to keep working, much less tax a household making $200,000 an ADDITIONAL $110,000, so you are going to have to shift most of that onto much higher income persons.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

Posted in Isms • Political Animals
Tags: Barack Obama • Socialism