TW: I want to be clear here. This BS about Obama and re-distributing wealth is just that. Drudge and many on the right are being intellectually dishonest claiming they have found a smoking gun with an old Obama radio interview where he discusses courts and taxation. Klein below dissects it well. Furthermore, why reversing W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy is somehow socialist is beyond me. What was re-distributive was initiating the tax cuts in the first place. As someone who has benefited from the lower rates, I accepted them with glee if not with reason. Republicans love grousing about federal income tax rates while quietly acquiesing to payroll taxes, user fees, sales taxes, state income taxes etc. all of the taxes which are more regressive in nature. This is intellectual dishonesty.
From Klein at Time:
"Today's edition of scrofulous mudslinging--aided and abetted by a banner headline from the Drudge Scourge--involves a wildly inaccurate reading of remarks that Barack Obama made in a 2001 radio interview. It turns out that he wasn't criticizing the Supreme Court for its failure to "redistribute" wealth. He was saying the exact opposite: that the Supreme Court wasn't the way to go. He was saying that political power was the only real way to make decisions about the distribution of taxation. Obama's sentiment is, of course, a wildly radical notion--or, at least it was, before the American Revolution.
To state the obvious, once again: We have had a redistribution of wealth, upward, during the Reagan era. Taxes on work, a.k.a. payroll taxes, have increased. Taxes on wealth, the upper margins of the income tax plus capital gains plus estate taxes, have decreased. To call Obama a socialist because he wants to redress this imbalance is as accurate as calling McCain an oligarch because he doesn't."
No comments:
Post a Comment