“What he really thinks” * Open Thread
By SusanUnPC on October 22, 2008 at 10:30 AM in Economy, John McCain, Open Thread
OPEN THREAD. But, I have just to share this with you since I heard John McCain give this speech on TV a short time ago, at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, and he had some great lines. The “money quotes” are below the fold. “Money quotes” like this one: “[I]n a campaign as disciplined and careful as my opponent’s, the worst missteps come when the candidate says what he really thinks.”
[...] [M]y opponent’s looking pretty confident these days. He’ll be addressing the nation soon. He’s got another of those big stadium spectacles in the works. But acting like the election is over won’t let him take away your chance to have the final say in this election.
Every so often, my opponent gives us all a little glimpse of what an Obama presidency would be like in the real world. And last week his campaign actually found itself on a detour into the real world — in the driveway of Joe the Plumber.
Now, Joe didn’t ask for Senator Obama to come to his house, and he didn’t ask to be famous. He certainly didn’t ask for the political attacks on him from the Obama campaign. Joe’s dream is to own a small business that will create jobs, and the attacks on him are an attack on small businesses all over the country. Small businesses employ 84 percent of Americans, and we need to help small businesses, and not raise their taxes.
As it happened, the Obama tax increase is just what Joe had on his mind. So Joe showed the Obama traveling press how to ask a tough question, and get an answer instead of just another talking point.
Thanks to him, we’ve finally learned what Senator Obama’s economic goal is. As he told Joe, Barack Obama wants to, quote, “spread the wealth around.”
In other words, Joe and guys like him will earn the wealth. Barack and politicians like him will spread it. Joe didn’t really like that idea, and neither did a lot of other folks who believe that their earnings are their own.
After all, before government can redistribute wealth, it has to confiscate wealth from those who earned it. And whatever the right word is for that way of thinking, the redistribution of wealth is the last thing America needs right now. In these tough economic times, we don’t need government “spreading the wealth” — we need policies that create wealth and spread opportunity.
It was a candid moment for Senator Obama, in the presence of a skeptical voter. And in a campaign as disciplined and careful as my opponent’s, the worst missteps come when the candidate says what he really thinks.
We’ve seen this before. In a debate with Senator Clinton, he was asked why on earth he wants to raise capital gains taxes, when history shows that cutting that tax rate actually yielded more revenue to the government. Rates were cut in the Clinton years — revenue went up. Rates were cut in the Bush years — revenue went up. My opponent’s answer was that taxes still had to be raised as a matter of, quote, “fairness.”
Let’s think about this very carefully. Here we have a case where increasing taxes would decrease the funds available for all the spending government does. But Senator Obama insists on a tax hike, as a matter of principle. And the principle seems to be the redistribution of wealth as an end in itself. Apparently, as my opponent sees it, there is a strict limit to your earnings and wealth, and it’s for politicians to decide. The proper amount of wealth is not what you can earn, but what government will let you keep.
My opponent has spoken about the reluctance of citizens and business owners to part with their earnings. He understands that when it’s time to spread the wealth around, quote, “They are not going to give up those profits easily.” And readers of his book “The Audacity of Hope,” might recall that he wrote about the need to “spread the wealth around” there, too. He writes of the need for “labor laws and tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation’s wealth.” He has talked elsewhere about how, in our day, “the distribution of wealth is even more skewed, and levels of inequity are now higher.”
What are really skewed in all of this are my opponent’s priorities. He talks about our economy in a detached and academic way, forgetting that the goal is not to redistribute wealth but to create it. And one thing academics are good at is inventing and redefining terms, which is what he’s up to with that phony income tax cut for 95 percent of the American people.
When a politician tells you he’s going to cut income taxes for 95 percent of all Americans, it’s reasonable to wonder how he’s going to do that for the 40 percent who pay no income taxes at all. Right now, tens of millions of Americans have an income tax bill of zero. How’s Barack Obama going to reduce the number zero?
Well, that’s the key to his whole plan: Since you can’t reduce income taxes on those who pay zero, the government will write them all checks called a tax credit. And the Treasury will have to cover those checks by taxing other people, including many small businesses and a lot of folks just like Joe the Plumber. In other words, Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on some in order to give checks to others is not a tax cut; it’s just another government giveaway.
What should really worry us is that Senator Obama can’t possibly spend all the money he promises to spend without raising taxes even more than he admits he will or digging us even further into debt, weakening the dollar and making everything you buy, from groceries to gasoline more expensive. He has promised in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars in new spending. …
Stay tuned for some wise words from LD on the economy, to be published later today … and now, an open thread.
by Ronald Scott
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