Human Events | Greg Knapp | Oct. 30, 2008
Our progressive tax system has always been on the edge of socialism. Obama wants to run it off the cliff. He is stipulating the purpose of the tax system is to take money from some and give it to others. That is a socialist idea Karl Marx would be proud of.
Excuse me for not taking part in the Obamagasms but this election is looking a lot more like 1984 instead of 2008. The Ministry of Truth keeps telling us what is okay to believe about Obama and that his words don’t really mean what they do. News outlets are banned from interviewing the candidate, citizens are investigated for asking questions, websites are scrubbed of controversial information and potentially embarrassing video tapes are kept under wraps. I understand this sounds a little Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but hear me out.
Audio from a 2001 radio interview with Obama showed that he has been a proponent of redistributing the wealth in America long before he met Joe the Plumber. The only question for him is whether the courts or the politicians and community organizers should be the ones doing the redistributing.
Obama spoke about the civil-rights movement and the Warren Court. He praised some of the rulings of the court and then said, “…but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society…”
Obama went on to say, “…One of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change… You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts.”
That is pretty straightforward stuff. Yet if you infer that Barack Obama is for redistributing the wealth in America, the Obama campaign and the mainstream media will set you straight.
“In this interview back in 2001, Obama was talking about the civil rights movement — and the kind of work that has to be done on the ground to make sure that everyone can live out the promise of equality,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton told ABC news. “Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Obama’s economic plan or his plan to give the middle class a tax cut. It’s just another distraction from an increasingly desperate McCain campaign.” Uh huh.
[…]
Obama’s connections to people who agree with socialist ideas include William Ayres, Reverend Wright, Father Phleger, Frank Marshall Davis, and Michael Klonsky.
Klonsky is a self-described communist who agrees with Ayres that the classroom is a perfect place to teach socialist ideas. (One step at a time, I guess.) The official Obama website had a blog run by Klonsky until another blogger brought up his radical history. Team Obama then scrubbed the website clean of any references to Klonsky and now it’s all down the memory hole.
We all heard Obama explain to Joe the plumber how his tax plan will “spread the wealth around.” Yet, when Senator Joe Biden was asked about that by a WFTV Orlando newscaster, Barbara West, Biden said, “He is not spreading the wealth around.”
You may think you heard Obama say he wanted to “spread the wealth around.” You may think you heard Obama support the idea of redistributing the wealth in that 2001 radio interview. You may think that giving a tax cut to people who don’t pay income taxes is redistributing the wealth. But the Obama people want you to know you are wrong. Hey, who are you going to believe, us or your own ears?
The Obama campaign was so upset by the tough questions from Barbara West it banned WFTV from any future interviews with the candidates or their wives. A Philadelphia news station had the temerity to ask Biden some more difficult questions and it too has been banned from all interviews with Obama and Biden.
Joe the plumber found out the hard way what happens when you question The Big O. He was investigated by the media and it breathlessly reported that his real name is not Joe (that’s his middle name), he doesn’t have a plumbing license (he doesn’t need one because he works under a licensed plumber), and he owes taxes on his house. The Columbus Dispatch reported that state and local computer databases were illegally accessed to dig up dirt on Joe. I’m just waiting for the Obama campaign to make him an “unperson.”
[…]
To recap:
Obama will tell you what his words mean.
Biden will explain you didn’t hear what you heard.
You will be punished for questioning Obama.
Information that does not support The One will be destroyed and forgotten.
Oh, and don’t forget, if you don’t vote for Obama you are a racist.
Is this the Change We Can Believe In?
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Can we get some validation that Obama indeed wants to provide tax credits to people who pay no taxes? According to his website (which I won’t even bother linking to here), it states that the tax credit goes to “workers” (and by definition, a worker is not on welfare). Who “doesn’t pay taxes” that works? According to recent IRS tax tables, anything between $0 and $7,825 is subject to a 10% federal income tax. This amount wouldn’t even fall into the minimum wage bracket.
That being said, Obama might do well to clearly state that no one is refunded money they didn’t actually pay. In other words, the tax credit would not exceed any monies acquired in tax revenues (you pay $800 in tax, you can receive no more than $800 back). I would hope we’re not providing “gifts” unnecessarily.
In terms of raising taxes, Republicans seem to only be opposed to them in theory while the reality is sometimes different: according to the Cato Institute, Sarah Palin as governor signed into a law a $1.5 billion tax increase on oil companies in the form of higher severance taxes (which was later doled out to individuals and companies to assist in reducing energy bills).
Either way, I’m expecting higher taxes at some point, no matter who ends up in office. We just spent $700 billion and the national debt clock ran out of digits. The next president will be a lame duck with their hands pretty much tied, fiscally speaking.