Call him what you want, it doesn’t change what he is

So the national Republican party and John McCain have taken a fancy to calling Barack Obama a socialist.  Personally, I don’t think they have a whole lot of room to cast stones.  Remember the recent tax rebate that Bush and co. pushed to have sent to all taxpayers, for example?  The bottom line is that Barack Obama does not completely fit the technical definition of a socialist (or communist, etc.).  He might match some of the requirements, but so does McCain and other Republicans.  It is all a matter of degree.

Obama has earned the title, however inaccurate it may be, because of his tax plan.  As I recently said in a comment:

Over 30% of people in this country already have no federal tax liability. Obama can’t actually cut their taxes, as he promises.

Both Obama’s and McCain tax plans (neither of which will ever become reality) will push the number of “non payers” to over 40%. McCain wants to give individuals a health insurance tax credit and take away the business tax break. Obama plans on creating a litany of refundable tax credits. Do you know what that means? Many, if not all, of those 40-something percent will get a check from the government while owing nothing. Many already do due to existing “tax credits” such as the child tax credit and absurdly named “earned income” tax credit.

Obama simply plans to use the tax code for more social engineering and wealth distribution and trying to pass it off as a tax cut.

Call him a socialist.  Call him a Marxist.  I don’t care.  The real point is that the foundation of his philosophy is to forcibly take more and more from the “rich” (and the threshold for being rich will be lower than you might imagine) and give it to the poor.  It is wealth redistribution.  Do Republicans do similar things?  Regrettably so.  However, Obama is pledging to up the ante considerably.

Obama has fought back with the most idiotic argument I can imagine.

“By the end of the week, he’ll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

There is a glaring flaw with his logic.  He voluntarily shared his toys and sandwich (assuming his anecdote is even true).  What he is promising to do as president is to use the threat of force to take from some and involuntarily give it to another.  Imagine him, as a precocious tot, spotting a smaller boy with more toys and then taking some – over the smaller boy’s objections – so that the distribution was more equitable in his eyes.

I want to know why Obama, a millionaire, hasn’t shared his wealth with his own aunt, who was just found to live in a “rundown public housing” project.  I guess he would rather “share” my money and your money instead of his own money.

Here’s some food for thought.  Obama is one of the poverty warriors who wrongly think that forcibly transferring money from one group to another will solve poverty.  On that point he is horribly wrong.  Let’s say that he could magically redistribute all the wealth, though.  How would that work out for you?  As a crude estimate I’ll look at national and global GDP using the 2007 CIA World Factbook.

If Obama could equally distribute all the world’s wealth that would leave each person with just under $10,000.  That doesn’t sound too great.  If he could magically distribute all of the wealth in the U.S. it would leave each person with about $45,000 – still not very attractive for a lot of us.  That, of course, ignores the crushing blow that GDP would take as achievers responded by not working as hard just to see the government simply take the fruits of their labor.

The ugly truth is that by and large both poor and rich people got that way for a reason.  You can reset the game by “spreading the wealth around” but unless you can change people’s financial acumen and both natural and learned talents they will eventually drift back to their original camps.