Obama Socialism
WSJ: Obama Would Europeanize America
Another must read from the WSJ today…
The only organization with a worse rating than the Republican president is the Democratic Congress—14% approval, 75% disapproval. But there, too, the Democrats will gain strength. They are expected to increase their majority in the House, and current polling shows that in Senate races Democrats will increase their members from the current 51 (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats) to at least 57. They may even achieve the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
So where is the new Obama administration likely to take us? Seven things seem certain:
- The U.S. military will withdraw from Iraq quickly and substantially, regardless of conditions on the ground or the obvious consequence of emboldening terrorists there and around the globe.
- Protectionism will become our national trade policy; free trade agreements with other nations will be reduced and limited.
- Income taxes will rise on middle- and upper-income people and businesses, and individuals will pay much higher Social Security taxes, all to carry out the new president’s goals of “spreading the wealth around.”
- Federal government spending will substantially increase. The new Obama proposals come to more than $300 billion annually, for education, health care, energy, environmental and many other programs, in addition to whatever is needed to meet our economic challenges. Mr. Obama proposes more than a 10% annual spending growth increase, considerably higher than under the first President Bush (6.7%), Bill Clinton (3.3%) or George W. Bush (6.4%).
- Federal regulation of the economy will expand, on everything from financial management companies to electricity generation and personal energy use.
- The power of labor unions will substantially increase, beginning with repeal of secret ballot voting to decide on union representation.
- Free speech will be curtailed through the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine to limit the conservative talk radio that so irritates the liberal establishment.
These policy changes will be the beginning of the Europeanization of America. There will be many more public policy changes with similar goals—nationalized health care, Kyoto-like global-warming policies, and increased education regulation and spending.
Additional tax advantages for lower and middle income people will be enacted: a 10% mortgage tax credit that would average about $500 per household per year, a $4,000 tax credit for college tuition, a tax credit covering half of child-care expenses up to $6,000 per year, and even a $7,000 credit for purchase of a clean car.
More important, all but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” meaning people will get a check for them if they owe no taxes, which is simply a transfer of income from the government to individuals. In reality this is the beginning of a new series of entitlements for middle-class families, the longer-term effect of which will be to make those families more dependant on (and so more supportive of) larger government. The Tax Policy Center estimates that these refundable tax credits would cost the government $648 billion over 10 years.
These are Mr. Obama’s plans. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats would increase spending for their own interests and favorite programs. More important, the Congress will consider itself more important than a freshman president who has never held an executive position, so they will do what they want and he will have to go along with most of it.
Obama: “Wealth Redistribution” from 2001
“Spread the wealth around” at Joe The Plumber’s house was no accidental comment.
Obama and the Tax Tipping Point
Another great WSJ op-ed piece…
Other nations have tried the ideology of fairness in the place of incentives and found that reward without work is a recipe for decline. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher took on the unions and slashed taxes to restore growth and jobs in Great Britain. In Germany a few years ago, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder defied his party’s dogma and loosened labor’s grip on the economy to end stagnation. And more recently in France, Nicolas Sarkozy was swept to power on a platform of restoring flexibility to the economy.The sequence is always the same. High-tax, big-spending policies force the economy to lose momentum. Then growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.
The economic tides will not stand still while Washington experiments with European-type social democracy, even though the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency will buy some time. Our trademark competitive advantage will be lost, and once lost, it will be hard to regain. There are too many emerging economies focused on prosperity and not redistribution for the U.S. to easily recapture its role of global economic leader.
Tomorrow’s children may come to question why their parents sold their birthright for a mess of “fairness” — whatever that will signify when jobs are scarce and American opportunity is no longer the envy of the world.
FT: Most Americans Do Better with McCain Tax Plan
The Financial Times posted a piece comparing the McCain and Obama tax plans in a clearer and more concise way, called “McCain is no salesman on tax proposals”. Here are some highlights…
So much has gone wrong for John McCain that it is surprising he is not further behind in the polls. He has been a victim of circumstances and his own bad judgment. Some of his errors, however, are more perplexing than others. How is it, for example, that Mr McCain has been so thoroughly outmanoeuvred on tax policy?
Both candidates have offered complex tax proposals. Proliferating alternative baselines (with or without the extension of the Bush tax cuts, with or without a “patch” for the alternative minimum tax, and so forth) deepen the confusion. Unable to fathom the details, voters are left to weigh the competing slogans. Mr Obama promises to cut taxes for 95 per cent of working families. Mr McCain says the rich need a tax cut, too. Guess who wins that argument.
Here is a fact you might not have noticed. It certainly seems to have slipped by most Americans. The typical US household would get a bigger tax cut under Mr McCain’s proposals than under Mr Obama’s. I know a few politicians who could do something with that…
Mr McCain wants to abolish the tax-break for employer-provided healthcare and replace it with a refundable $5,000 credit. Mr Obama says that a family health plan might cost $12,000 a year – leaving families who buy their own policy $7,000 worse off. This is incorrect. So far as I know, Mr McCain has never taken the trouble to explain why.
Suppose a family currently has a $12,000 policy provided by an employer. Under the McCain proposal, instead of attracting relief as at present, this benefit would be taxed as ordinary employment income – but the extra tax paid would be more than offset by the new $5,000 credit. In the first analysis, nothing changes so far as employers are concerned: all the action is on the employee’s pay cheque. The policy delivers a net tax cut to middle-income households and is enough to make the McCain tax plan on average a better overall deal for them than the Obama plan…
As well as failing to drive this home, Mr McCain has only weakly resisted his opponent’s notion that “wealthy companies” can afford to pay more. Business taxes, in the end, are paid by people – in lower wages, higher prices and lower dividends in their 401k plans. The point is not just that US corporate taxes are high by international standards and that this discourages investment and employment but that the burden eventually falls on ordinary Americans. Perhaps Mr McCain’s recent emphasis on corporate greed makes it difficult for him to point this out.
When Mr McCain misrepresents Mr Obama, he cannot even do it plausibly. Mr Obama is indeed planning to cut taxes for 95 per cent of working families. Rather than saying, “No he isn’t”, Mr McCain could have said: “Look at what his changes do to marginal tax rates, at the bottom of the income scale (as benefits are phased out), as well as at the top.” Rather than saying, “He wants to raise your taxes,” he could have said, “His spending plans will force him to raise your taxes.”
Critical reading…READ IT HERE
GET OUT THE VOTE!
We conservatives need to get out the vote now more than ever. Much like the Democrats encourage each other, with the motivation and intention to skew the election results away from the stance of the population, rather than any interest they claim to have in providing fairness and true representation of the country’s views. They know this with total clarity and have combined to that end with great sinister cooperation.
We need to spread the word far and wide that in every town, in every county, in every state (even the liberal ones) we need to make our voices heard and our votes counted. It’s easy and doesn’t take much time, and even if it did freedom isn’t free and being busy is no excuse.
First, vote yourself. No matter how much you’re certain of the positive or negative outcome regardless of your vote, you need to be counted or you can’t complain about the result. Second, spread the word to your conservative family, friends, and neighbors. Press them with reason that voting is the only way to bring about change since we’re not quite yet to a point where we need a coup.
It’s common knowledge that when we conservatives vote, we win. We’re always the majority in common sense, charity, and altruistic (largely Christian) effort to truly lift the less fortunate from the chains the Democrats have forged around their necks.
We’re the majority of the country’s population for heaven’s sake!
But unfortunately, we’re far behind in activism and “community organization” and representation in the media. This is likely due to the fact that we’re busy working on the American Dream, with little time for protesting outside corporations all day with signs and slogans (where do they get the time?) Our singlular focus on getting a piece of the pie must change, until the country changes and we can all go back to focusing on our pursuit of happiness and prosperity.
We must gain a greater awareness of the state of the nation. Our inaction is causing a shift in power as the Democrats register and hype those over which they preside as masters and keepers. Our inaction leads to the persistence of the programs and policies we so often decry. Our inaction will keep the country in the depth of recession and depression. Will it be another 50 years like the Democrats and closet-Socialists gave us? It’s up to us.
Democrat policies and the communities the left organizes are the source of our financial crisis. This kind of policy, enforced by the same guilty parties, will never lead to a better outcome. They need to be removed from office and their policies discontinued.
Vote and help those around you to vote. Plan a carpool for election day, make reminder calls, take the time to persuade and befriend those you know are conservative and remind them of the urgency of the emergency in this country. We are on the verge of an all Democrat government siege. That kind of crisis is actually far more dangerous, and in more widespread and moral ways, than the current mortgage crisis. There’s no doubt about it.
Please be sure to vote and open your mouth. The liberals around you will try to suppress you, as that is the only way they will win. But stand for your values. Again, please be sure to vote and open your mouth.
Video: Escaped The Plantation, Voting McCain
Perhaps the best speech given during this entire campaign cycle.
The O-Team
More genius by ZO. See more great clips here
Obama’s Socialist Tax, In His Own Words
Obama’s mouth keeps on giving. Unfortunately, his mouth is writing check his butt can’t cash. The Tickler appeals to all readers, use your brain and show up to vote. We can’t let this guy get into office.
Plumber: “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it.”
Obama: “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind ya, that they have a chance for success too. I think that when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.” Obama the crooked imbecile on the stump (see the video here)
From the desk of the Tickler’s wife…
Here are some key takeaways from the WSJ piece on the true nature of Obama’s tax “cuts”:
Here’s the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer — a federal check — from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this “welfare,” or in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign a “Demogrant.” Mr. Obama’s genius is to call it a tax cut.
The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.
The total annual expenditures on refundable “tax credits” would rise over the next 10 years by $647 billion to $1.054 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center. This means that the tax-credit welfare state would soon cost four times actual cash welfare. By redefining such income payments as “tax credits,” the Obama campaign also redefines them away as a tax share of GDP. Presto, the federal tax burden looks much smaller than it really is.
Town Hall: “Take It To Obama!”
Obama’s Friends
Cartoons By Michael Ramirez
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