Thursday, August 04, 2011

Who stole Obama's ice cream when he was a kid?

After signing the debt deal the other day, President Obama give a speech (natch) where he repeated his call for new taxes:
Everyone’s going to have to chip in. That’s only fair. That’s the principle I’ll be fighting for during the next phase of this process.
Of course we all know that Obama doesn't believe that "everybody" is going to chip in. His personal vision of "shared sacrifice" is somebody else sacrifices their share, because then that's fair. And, man, Obama really wants everything to be fair.
He’s overly sensitive to someone differing with him on policy grounds,” Cantor says.
And he’s isn’t persuasive. “There’s never any sort of economic argument that he can make for his position. It always reverts to that social-justice end,” Cantor argues.

Not that Obama uses the phrase “social justice.” “It’s ‘fairness.’”
Flashback to the 2008 campaign. Charlie Gibson informs candidate Barack Obama that if the goal is to raise revenue for the government, it's best to keep capital gains taxes low. But that flies in the face of Obama's religion of fairness where the wealthy aren't allowed to hold on to their money. Here's how Ed Morrissey graded the exchange:
Read and listen very carefully to this. The higher priority for Obama isn’t to raise revenue; it’s to ensure fairness. In order to do that, he will have the government take a bigger share of the gains and redistribute them through social programs to others. The pretense of having more money acts as a veneer for good, old-fashioned redistributionism.
"Fairness" is Obama's North Star, although it's most immediate and repeated form is that of class warfare. The circumstances and ancillary effects matter not, since that's what's fair.

4 comments:

Roger Bournival said...

No half-wit comment, Nigel?

Anonymous said...

Strange that Obama, Reid, and Pelosi didn't make things more "fair" while they controlled Congress.

another Eric Lindholm said...

"Fairness" is subjective, and you're right that Obama over-relies on that theme. But we have the "class warfare" that you alluded to already. With capital gains rates so low, social security taxes ending just over $100k, and other tax-reducing mechanisms for fatcats so high, our current tax structure is regressive: those in the lower brackets (except the very lowest) end up paying a higher overall tax rate than the wealthy. Personally, that doesn't strike me as anywhere near sensible, never mind "fair"; but even if you stipulate that those concepts are out of bounds, it's not hard to intuit why current policies have been so ruinous to the economy and stifled job creation.

Rightwing chatterheads said...

Rule number one of class warfare is: you don't talk about class warfare.