Socialism thy name is Barack Hussein Obama:
Mr. Obama unveiled much of his economic strategy in Wisconsin this week: He wants to spend $150 billion on a green-energy plan. He wants to establish an infrastructure investment bank to the tune of $60 billion. He wants to expand health insurance by roughly $65 billion. He wants to “reopen” trade deals, which is another way of saying he wants to raise the barriers to free trade.
He intends to regulate the profits for drug companies, health insurers, and energy firms. He wants to establish a mortgage-interest tax credit. He wants to double the number of workers receiving the earned income tax credit, the EITC, and triple the EITC benefit for minimum-wage workers. The Obama spend-o-meter is now up around $800 billion. And tax hikes on the rich won’t pay for it. It’s the middle class that will ultimately shoulder this fiscal burden in terms of higher taxes and lower growth.
This isn’t free enterprise. It’s old-fashioned-liberal tax, and spend, and regulate. It’s plain ol’ big government. The only people who will benefit are the central planners in Washington.
The Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore has done the math on Mr. Obama’s tax plan. He says it will add up to a 39.6% personal income tax, a 52.2% combined income and payroll tax, a 28% capital-gains tax, a 39.6% dividends tax, and a 55% estate tax.
Not only is Mr. Obama the big-spending candidate, he’s also the very-high-tax candidate. And what he wants to tax is capital. Doesn’t Senator Obama understand the vital role of capital formation in creating businesses and jobs? Doesn’t he understand that without capital, businesses can’t expand their operations and hire more workers?
Dan Henninger, writing in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, notes that Mr. Obama’s is a profoundly pessimistic message. “Strip away the new coat of paint from the Obama message and what you find is not only familiar,” Mr. Henninger writes. “It’s a downer.”
Its the same ole’ take from the rich and give to the poor routine which does nothing but bring our economy further down into the sewers. Take a good look at Carters presidency to see it in action, and make no bones about it, this man is the second coming of Jimmy Carter. He ignores capitalism, incentives for entrepreneurs and investors and the basic premise that if the taxpayer has more money in his pocket to spend, more money will come into government.
It’s pure anti-growth hogwash. Pure Socialist drivel.
But he gains popularity as he stays abstract. Hope, change, and all that jazz. Once he releases his plans, like he did with this economic paper, we see him for what he is.
Seriously, we all want great schools and affordable health care. We all want a clean environment and an end to crime and war. Conservatives and liberals alike want all that but the difference is that conservatives live in a reality based world while the liberal lives in some abstract reality where everything and everyone will live in harmony if we only break the big oil conspiracy, or the war conglomerate conspiracy….name your conspiracy and they live in it.
The conundrum is that their conspiracies all involve big government but their solutions to the problem is….more big government. Conservatives on the whole want less government in our lives. The more they stay out of the way the more our society prospers.
Obama has been successful up to now because his agenda has stayed hidden. At some point his real face will be exposed to the country and hopefully he will be rejected. But I look at Jimmy Carter and wonder ‘will it be too late’? By the time the country is exposed to the real Obama will he already be in office?
See author page
What next? Tax the air we breath?
It’s amazing how little things do change in Washington.
The Obama effect:
Jimmy Carter here we come again. Obama is supposed to be new and fresh and all that but all he offers is the same old liberal nostrums. He’ll wreck our economy, that’s for sure. Worse than that, though, is all the us vs them, rich vs poor that Curt mentions above. He claims to be all about unity and all that but it’s all about dividing Americans along class lines.
We haven’t seen the best of it yet … the amount of money he’ll cut from DoD and war funding. And, we haven’t gotten to the good part, where a President Obama will blame us for a wrecked economy, just like Carter did in 1978 and 1979.
re Melissa: “What next? Tax the air we breath?”
Heh. he’ll just tax the carbon you EXhale.
CarbonTax on the evil SUV, children (new carbon polution).
carbon tax breaks for drug companies
I will be surprised if all of america’s cities survive until 2012 if either dem becomes president.
(but with the dems screwing up intellignce gathering as they are now,… one US city is gone before 2010) and then the perament loss of freedom to the dem-gov’t will be massive.
And on top of it he wants to give hundreds of billions to the UN to fight poverty. We got Kofi Anan running for the president of the United States. Now isn’t that special? The cult of personality is getting tiresome. Those “Twilight Zone” episodes where a lot shorter than this election season.
Well we only get what we vote for. This time around we are stuck between a rock star and a hard place.
The free enterprise on infrastructure isn’t doing that well. California wants to put up some toll roads and the government is facing some opposition over them. Imagine all the roads and bridges being tolled. Either everyone will need a sticker that’s scanned like they do in Australia or they have to wait in line at toll booths. Remember to have lots of change. Also schools could be tolled along with entering any government building and any emergency calls. That’s the way free enterprise works on infrastructure. The water company could be in charge of flood prevention system, dams, aqueducts etc. which would raise the water bills (in California an extra $10 billion would be collected by the watr companies rather than government). Infrastructure companies would not only collect the $150 billion a year for routine maintenance (which wouldn’t handled by the government), but the $1 trillion in upgrades and rebuilding (replacing whole structures). This wouldn’t even make government much smaller since people would have to come out and inspect the infrastructure and if utilities are involved, all of the cost would be regulated by the government (adding even more bean counters). Already construction companies are leary of working with the government because of restraints. Some government officals are already consered when companies aren’t showing up for bidded contracts, which either leads to no bid contracts or projects being abandoned. To get these companies to do the infrastucture projects, the government will probably have to take a hands off approach leading to increased costs, less oversight and probably more corruption which has already shown up in previously done work. In short, your taxes will probably stay the same, but your bills will go way up and you still won’t be safer.
The $150 billion in “green” infrastructure wouldn’t be so bad. After all, this supposed tax rebate scheme is said to be about $150 billion and already people are saying it won’t work because people will use it to pay down debt or buy things from China rather than helping the U.S. economy (the scheme already failed when it was done in 2001). At least here it would provide jobs and keep on giving rather than this tax rebate which will help the economy for a couple of days.
EITC could be reworked by taking money out of unemployment and welfare’s $350 billion a year. It was originally set up as a monitary swap from people not working and collecting social security and welfare, to people working and collecting the EITC.
The $65 billion in extended health insurance can be done by taking money out of the welfare program and mix it with government/community service (aka working for the government). I would put that at 96 hours per year for a single person and 480 hours per year for a family without touching welfare or 48 hours for a single person and 240 hours for a family and touching welfare.
“He intends to regulate the profits for drug companies, health insurers, and energy firms.” Here are his major flaws. The only reign in the insurance companies cost and prevent dumping is for the government to create a for profit inhouse insurance company like the post office. Other companies would have to do a better job or lose customers. The drug companies have decided to make blockbuster drugs (often for useless “problems”), but this is a world wide problem. No drug company is going to spend millions of dollars or even billions to help a few hundred or even a few thousand people. They make their money selling to hundreds of thousands of people. The only way for drugs to be created to help rare diseases is for some organization to take a loss, which is only something a government organization would be willing to do. Energy firms are already efficent and if one invests in them, they get some good dividends (some of their money back). Energy firms don’t need tax breaks (an estimated $76.5 billion from 2005-2014)or subsidies (any money they want could still be taken from their own dividends). I wouldn’t call an end to tax breaks a tax increase, but it might be labled as such.
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/electricity/energybill/articles.cfm?ID=12395
I don’t know if there will be more taxes. Reagan and both Bushes just took the money from Social Security and Medicare and increased the debt. Obama could do the same, but maybe he could take from welfare too.
Man, now that was some pretty heave tap dancing to justify tax increases and socialism. We have another starry eyed obamamite amongst us it seems.
Since Obama doesn’t qualify for government benefits for “minorities”, (he is not black but an Arab), what are they trying to elect? His entire life is a lie. Trillions of your dollars are proposed (special tax increase proposed by Hussein Obama) for the U.N. to distribute to ‘Arabs’ who will kill you with your own money given the chance. Michele is just one of the loud mouths you see at demonstrations screaming ‘hang whitey’.
What’s funny is that the Clinton campaign’s painting Obama as the next McGovern. From Robert Novak:
“Strategists for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign believe it is imperative to identify her high-flying opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, with the “McGovern wing” of the Democratic Party – but they want to keep their candidate’s fingerprints off the attack.
During the two weeks remaining before the important Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, Clinton insiders want to spread the message that Obama represents the radical left-wing politics of George McGovern’s 1972 candidacy, which won only one state. But they don’t know how to accomplish this. When Clinton herself has launched past attacks on Obama, it has hurt her with voters.
The Clinton campaign is confident of winning in Texas because of the state’s Hispanic vote. But it sees the need in Ohio to identify Obama as a leftist in the eyes of lower-income white voters, who often have supported Republican candidates against Democratic opponents they consider too liberal.”
Just a question? was Barack born in the U.S.A.
DemocRats – Bankrupting America. One election at a time…
800 billion here and another 850 billion there for the UN and pretty soon you are talking about big bucks. How will he ever finance these socialist dreams? Businesses will be leaving in droves and wall street will move to London. We are doomed if this empty suit is elected.
RE: jainphx asks, “was Barack born in the U.S.A.?” According to the various bios, he was born in Honolulu, HI in 1961.
A more interesting point, however, is that when you search “Barack Obama bio,” it returns entries such as “short biography.” Short not in terms of length, but short in terms of sparse.
how anyone could complain about the spending habits of any liberal/democrat after the spending of supposedly conservative president bush… is beyond me? I mean… do you guys even have a fiscal conservative anymore? seems like the only candidates anymore are liberal spenders.
but hey, big government spending isn’t a big deal as long as it’s for big dreamy neo-con ideas like spreading democracy and fighting terror in a country that didn’t have any before we got there.
The muslim want’s to tax our asses, so he can blow up another tower!!!!