“Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama:
Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused.
Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.”
The above quote is from Daniel Henninger’s excellent article The Obama Rosetta Stone in today’s Wall Street Journal pointing out the extremist income redistribution goals of Obama. As Wikipedia explains, “‘[t]he term Rosetta Stone has become idiomatic as something that is a critical key to a process of decryption or translation of a difficult problem”. So in this case, if you understand the above, you understand Obama’s economic policy, which in one word is REDISTRIBUTION.
Where is this chart? Is it in one of Obama’s popular books or campaign pieces? No, this graph is in Obama’s official budget summary published by the Government’s printing press “A New Era of Responsibility – Renewing America’s Promise“. As Henninger explains, the chart comes from 2 radical leftist economists and is accompanied by a screed against income inequality:
One finds many charts in a federal budget, most attributed to such deep mines of data as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The one on page 11 is attributed to “Piketty and Saez.” Either you know instantly what “Piketty and Saez” means, or you don’t. If you do, you spent the past two years working to get Barack Obama into the White House. If you don’t, their posse has a six-week head start on you.
Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, French economists, are rock stars of the intellectual left. Their specialty is “earnings inequality” and “wealth concentration.”
… Turn to page five of Mr. Obama’s federal budget, and one may read these commentaries on the top 1% datum:
“While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not.”
“Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected.”
“There’s nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It’s a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it.”
Surprise, surprise, Obama really did mean what he said when he told Joe the Plumber he wanted to spread the wealth around. Obama’s tax and spending bills are not intended to raise revenue or stimulate the economy, but to redistribute wealth and he’s inserting his ideology for everyone to see right there in the most blaring of terms in the driest of documents, the federal budget. This should be a true wake-up call to those who think Obama is a benign pragmatist. A guy who feels it necessary to proselytize this explicitly in the budget ain’t no pragmatist; he’s a propagandist and he wants to convert you (BTW this reminds me of those in the last century who were stunned that another demagogue actually meant what he said; those who weren’t surprised had read Mein Kampf and took the writer at his word).
Henninger goes on:
What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.
The “top 1%” isn’t just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to “pay for” the fact of their wealth — no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.
..The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of “wealth” from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget’s “Top One Percent of Earners” chart.
To add my two cents,
- Here’s what people should realize – the VAST majority of taxes are already paid by the top income earners. Contrast the above with this chart and article from the Heritage Foundation:
- For those out there who agree with Obama’s redistributive line of thinking, I would say:
- From a Catholic perspective, to embrace it as a manifestation of one’s theology toward the poor is to embrace it as a form of liberation and Marxist theology – a focus on materialistic liberation rather than spiritual liberation from sin.
- From an economic perspective, the Robin Hood take from the rich and give to the poor scheme simply doesn’t work. Giving money and services to those who didn’t earn them is a guaranty of increased dependence and decreased productivity (i.e., they get fat and lazy). Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is the death knell to everyone’s prosperity. In the United States the wealthy are the successful, and the super wealthy are the SUPER sucessful and super entrepenuers who have for the most part created vast number of jobs and wealth for others. Check out the Forbes 400 Richest Americans and read their summary biographies and you’ll find that 90% of them from the day they could work have been turbo charged economic engines firing on all pistons. Many started in modest circumstances only to go on to start and run global companies that produce more than many small countries do, and employ tens to hundreds of thousands of people, with some starting or fueling whole new industries or sectors of industries that never before existed. The majority aren’t lazy fat cats who live on their trust funds, but workaholics who love what they do and do it 24/7. These are the capital creators and the capital expanders. Once you take from them the fruits of their labor you kill much of their incentive to expand their businesses, start new ones, or to invest in and nourish new industries. Sure some may wish people would do this for something other than money but in this post-Eden world humans aren’t made like that and it’s unrealistic and dangerous to think they will.
- From a political side, it’s a guarantee of societal suicide. You will end up with 75% of the country paying little or no taxes, and getting free this, free that, subsidized this, subsidized that. But the other 25% get penalized the more they produce. Majority rules. With each year the burdens on the few stakeholders get bigger while the non-stakeholders get greedier and greedier. Eventually the stakeholders pull up and out and the whole flimsy structure collapes.
- From a charitable point of view, it’s WAY more efficient to have private citizens give money to charities rather than have government take the money, subtract the government’s cut in the form of waste and inefficiency, and throw the money at worthless projects.
- From a moral point of view, it’s objectionable as it guaranties the government will inject it with political and moral purposes anathema to those they have taken it from (e.g., government funded abortions, embryo and fetal experimentation, stem cell research, etc.,etc.).
Also see this chart and the accompanying article linked to it put out by the The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C.:
As the article notes, even after the Bush Tax Cuts, the top 20% of income earners (those earning over $68,000 a year) pay over 80% of the taxes (in fact the Bush tax cuts caused the top income earners to pay a larger share of taxes). In a 2008 “Summary of Latest Federal Individual Income Tax Data“, the Tax Foundation finds that for 2006 “the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 39.9 percent of all federal individual income taxes”. You heard right, the top 1% is supporting 40% of the taxes already.
As an aside, and from a Catholic perspective regarding families I find this interesting:
An attack on the wealthy is an attack on families, the heart of the Church (doesn’t that come as a shocker? )