Kung Fu Monkey asks the question.
All to say — what happens when the Socialist Nightmare never arrives? I mean, it’s been a useful shadow threat for years, a lurking monster that lost a little power after the fall of the Soviet Union, but still had some spark thanks to several generations raised with a primal reaction to the very word. It was the last big wrench in the toolbox, and not one you wanted to pull out ot often.
But the best monsters are always the ones just offscreen. In their thrashing for purchase against Senator Obama, Senator McCain’s campaign may have over-reached. An awful lot of conservative leaders have declared that an Obama presidency is October 22, 1844 in the great battle of freedom versus socialism. Interesting to see what happens when the people who’ve been fed a steady diet of terror images — state-run medical care with month-long waits, abortion kiosks in the mall and forced gay-friendly kindergarten education — encounter instead a higher minimum wage, guaranteed health care, and the occasional bit of science-based policy.
As Kurtz said, “The horror! The horror!”
The smart thing the Obama campaign did was set up a website where individuals could click in to see how much money they would save with the Obama tax plan over the McCain plan.The site had well over a million clicking in to figure out their indiviudal and family tax.So much for ‘socialism’.
Look for more of this savvy use of the internet by Obama administration.
Looks like they’re trying to set up a decent information site at change.gov.
Doug, you’ve often pointed out before that we are kinda socialist already, what with the sort of government involvement we have in everything already. I can’t disagree.
It’s not going to be a pure socialism. You don’t have that anywhere in the world right now anyway, any more than you have pure capitalism anywhere in the world, so of course it’s a boogeyman, to a point. So, Kung Fu Monkey meets the scare on one side with the hyperbole of ridicule on the other. Besides, the wisened leaders of our age have come to realize that capitalism is the only means for generating wealth. See: China. Governments angle for the perfect percentage to graft from it such that the balance is struck to create the most government possible without killing the economy.
As one who doesn’t want any socialism, I’m still interested to see the way the scales tip and the degrees to which we move to more socialism. Obama’s tax calculator is brilliant, Lou, in its’ populist attraction, because very few people out there really believe they are rich, and it’s always nice to punch in your numbers and see that your burden will be lighter. The flip to that is that the burden to a few will be greater. Government will be paid for be very few, with the percentage of people paying no federal income taxes becoming pretty high, and the recipients of largesse becoming higher, because some who pay nothing now are getting even more back in refunds. That’s pretty clever stuff! If one ‘pays’ $3,000 in federal income taxes in a year, and gets a ‘refund’ of $4,300, is that not socialism? Is that not redistribution of wealth? It’s damn clever, because it uses the libertarian populism of a ‘tax cut’ as its vehicle. Hat’s off to Obama!
Kruschev said that Americans would never accept socialism in one fell swoop, but would eagerly accept it small bit by small bit. I’d say the man was awfully prescient.
There seems to be a fetish over the federal income tax in some circles. Just because people don’t pay much or any of that tax, the conclusion is drawn that their tax burden is minimal or insufficient somehow. As I understand it, the federal income tax was initially intended to apply to only about the top 10% of income earners.
You’ve been careful with your terms, Mike, so I’m not accusing you of this; but I’ve seen any number of conservative commentators casually slip from “pay no federal income taxes” to “pay no taxes.”
Yes, I have also heard the right wing talkers casually ‘forget’ to mention the distinction between paying federal income taxes and no federal taxes at all. The only way to achieve this is to not draw a paycheck at all. Certainly the other federal taxes are still in place, such as the payroll tax, and social security, for anyone drawing a paycheck. Neither Obama nor McCain were talking about cuts to anything but the federal income tax. Eric Schansberg is the only federal candidate I know of who was talking about affecting the payroll tax. He was for elimination of it, on the basis that it hurts the poorest wage earners the most.
In 1913, with the full ratification of the 16th Amendment, the first bracket was 1%, and the second was 7%. I don’t know what percentage of Americans this affected. By 1918, it changed to 6% and 73%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
Hauser’s Law is most instructive. It says that no matter what the brackets are, the tax revenues will be roughly 19.5% of GDP. So, it’s a question of who you want to bear the burden, and how heavily. Who gets a free ride. &c.