There is a specter haunting the suburbs. Actually, there are hundreds of them, mostly made of plastic, and they’re hanging from trees and porches and front door lintels in expectation of the great candy-grab coming on Friday.
At our house, we do not go in for Halloween decorations, apart from the one-pumpkin-per-child that somehow I get talked into buying every year.
Nonetheless, we, too, have a specter haunting our house that is visible even to small children, as I discovered when I stepped outside yesterday to find the seven-year-old diligently sticking up Halloween posters of her own design.
“Come on peopel! Macane is grat!” said one, which was stuck to a rosebush. Others signs referred to “Mccaine!” and “Mcan!” (Consistent spelling is not, alas, the hobgoblin of this particular child’s mind.)
But then came the really specter-ish one, its message undoubtedly construed from eavesdropping on me: “Beware! Obama Brings Taxis!”
If that were genuinely the promise of an Obama presidency, that he would bring taxis, we could all relax. There’s never a taxi around when you want one, certainly not in the Halloween-festooned suburbs, and if Herbert Hoover wished a chicken for every pot, why shouldn’t Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, bring us all taxis?
Alas, it is not taxis, exactly, to which the sweet child was referring. And indeed, if Obama wins next Tuesday, it may not be long before taking a taxi will seem a luxury on par with having an organic chicken in one’s pot.
Now perhaps, as some sage Washingtonians can be heard to murmur, whoever takes office next January would be forced in any case by the economic crisis to raise all sorts of taxes on all sorts of Americans. Maybe.
But it is a certainty that only one presidential ticket evinces a desire to raise taxes. That ticket’s presidential candidate wishes to “spread the wealth around” by docking your paycheck, dear federal income taxpayer, in order to give your money to someone who may not have paid any federal income taxes at all.
This same man has talked of his ambition to raise capital gains tax rates “for the purposes of fairness.” Not to produce needed revenue, or to create incentives for one sort of savings over another, but to punish Americans who had the wit to invest wisely.
In Obama’s hoped-for tax regime, investors would be taxed more aggressively because it’s unfair for them to reap the rewards of risking their savings in the market.
Meanwhile, we’ve been repeatedly assured that only hateful super-rich fat cats making a quarter of a million would be required to take what Obama’s runningmate, Sen. Joe Biden, D-DE, called the patriotic measure of paying more taxes.
That this putatively plutocratic class includes thousands of families in which both parents work hard for their salaries, as well as small businesses run on risk and sweat, goes unacknowledged.
That the vast majority of “rich” Americans earn their wages rather than raking money in from family trusts or skimming it off hedge funds, well, that’s not worth talking about.
“There are a lot of rich people out there whom we can tax at a point down the road,” Rep. Barney Frank, D-MA, said last week, all but licking his lips at the prospect of reaching into other people’s pockets, come the Obama ascendancy.
In recent days, the Obama campaign has begun ratcheting downwards its idea of who fits in that despised class. On Monday, Biden told a Pennsylvania TV station that taxes would not go up for those making less than $150,000.
Don’t be surprised if after the election that number is a lot lower. It’ll have to be, to pay for the spending spree the Obamacrats have in mind. This should send a Halloween chill down everyone’s backs.
As the sign said: “Beware!”
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
