I worked in Albany, N.Y., years ago and remember stories about how the famed Democratic political machine there used to buy votes for $5 apiece, and I thought of that the other night when I saw a Barack Obama ad on TV.
The candidate makes those old boys look like pikers.
His proposal, in case you haven’t caught this slick commercial or read about it, is to give families $1,000 if they elect him, calling the handout part of a “stimulus plan” to get the economy going faster. It’s also supposed to be a way of helping middle-class families to pay for gasoline increases and heating bills.
You might figure there is something cynical going on here — and so do I, at least in regard to sending out a check with money taken through a so-called windfall profit tax on oil companies. But look at the Obama policies as a whole, and you sense there could also be something ideologically sincere going on here, which could be even more dangerous for America.
Obama just may be as far left as any presidential candidate who has had a real chance of winning an election, and one thing that leftism entails — as Sarah Palin put it in her debate with Joe Biden — is a “redistribution of wealth principle.”
For the sake of income equality, Obama wants to take a whole lot more from those who make the most and give the proceeds to everyone else through a variety of mechanisms, from various kinds of tax credits to big increases in “refunds” for those workers who pay no income tax.
The government already redistributes wealth, of course, and despite the constantly reiterated fiction to the contrary, the gap between the share of taxes paid by the best-off and those beneath them has grown during the Bush years.
According to various reports of the most recently available Internal Revenue Service figures, the top 1 percent of wage earners pay almost 40 percent of the income tax, the top 5 percent pay 60 percent and the top 50 percent pay 97 percent.
Millions of American workers pay no income taxes at all, and the bottom 40 percent not only owe the government nothing or little, but get money back through the earned income tax credit that exceeds anything forked over.
A lot of this is a consequence of those maligned and misrepresented Bush tax cuts that ended up doing far more for middle- and lower-income workers than you would ever guess when wading through the thicket of demagogic lies planted by our liberal brethren.
Now comes Obama, shouting that the Bush taxation policy was terribly unfair and awful, and that you can’t leave all that rich-person money in the private sector where it generates economic good, but that the government must capture the cash and turn it over to the middle class.
He wants to hit upper-income Americans with taxes as high as before Bush, increase payroll and capital gains taxes for this group, increase corporate taxes that consumers will pay while making firms less competitive, expand the number who don’t pay anything by millions and send them vastly enlarged cash gifts.
Carried to the extremes he envisions, ours will become less a tax system than an enervating, economy-crippling welfare-state theft system, a way of saying that your money is not yours, that all money is in fact communal, that exceptional energy, talent and brainpower should be punished and those of lesser circumstances told that there’s no point in striving when everything can be handed to them gratis.
And all it takes to get there is your well-compensated vote.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington, D.C., opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at [email protected].
