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• 1. Joe  |  October 29th, 2008 at 10:50 am

  What? No outrage over Obama showing a 30-minute ad tonight and “delaying” the start of the World Series game?
  I thought there would be all kinds of outrage. After all, McCain has nothing to offer the American public, so why not complain about something else that doesn’t matter.

  Oh… he did yesterday!

  HERSHEY, Pa. — Sen. John McCain made a direct appeal to baseball lovers Tuesday morning while mocking his rival’s decision to buy 30 minutes of television time Wednesday night for an address to the nation.
  “No one will delay the World Series with an infomercial when I’m president,” he said to the approval of a crowd of thousands at a stadium here.
  The Fox television network agreed with a request by Major League Baseball to move the start of Game 6 of the series by 15 minutes to accommodate Obama’s purchase of the television time, during which he plans to make his closing campaign argument.
  In fact, McCain’s own convention speech this summer forced a change in the start time of the NFL’s season opener, which started an hour and a half earlier to accommodate McCain’s speech.

  Every time McCain tries tearing down Obama about something, it turns out he has done the same thing or worse. McCain’s entire campaign is an absolute joke.

  He complained about Ayers. Meanwhile McCain is a big fan of G. Gordon Liddy.
  He complained about Wright. Meanwhile McCain accepts the endorsement of wacko right-wing zealots.
  He compained about ACORN. Meanwhile McCain himself was a speaker at one of their get togethers.
  He complained about Obama being an elitist. Meanwhile McCain owns how many homes and cars? Palin had how much spent on clothes?? Geesh.

  McCain’s straight talk express is anything BUT.

• 2. Joe  |  October 29th, 2008 at 11:24 am

  Interesting regarding Obama’s “socialist” views…

  COOPER: It’s certainly a question the McCain campaign has kind of been hammering at, portraying Obama as a socialist. You hear that on — on the Palin campaign as well.

  Is it working?

  GERGEN: They may be making some modest progress with it, Anderson. We did see some evidence of McCain coming up a point or two here and there. I don’t think it’s anywhere near close enough to win an election. And more importantly, I don’t think the Democrats have really answered it appropriately.

  You know, Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was very much an advocate of what’s called progressive taxation. Ad that is the rich pay more than the poor in terms of taxes.

  Now, one of the most effective popular programs we’ve had in the last three decades. It’s called the earned income tax credit. It’s a program whereby, if you’re a working person, a working couple and you’re below the poverty line, the government will actually give you money. That’s a redistributed program. It’s a program which takes money from the upper classes and gives it to the lower — to the working poor.

  Now who started that program? The earned income tax credit? Ronald Reagan. It was one of the — it was an achievement of the Reagan administration that Bill Clinton then built on.

  So I think that these arguments are — you know, some of them get so carried away that they don’t recognize the realities of what we’ve been going through in public policy and the big arguments about why the wealth over the last 30 years has been redistributed. It’s been redistributed upwards.

  Apparently Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were both “socialists” as well.

• 3. Joe  |  October 29th, 2008 at 3:16 pm

  Yet another McCain/Palin tactic debunked. In fact McCain himself supports a progressive tax!!! Another example of blasting Obama over something when they’ve done/supported the same exact thing.

  Source (Do read the entire thing… it isn’t that long)
  
  Sen. John McCain’s campaign has seized on Sen. Barack Obama’s offhand remark that he wants to “spread the wealth around” to allege Obama is a socialist.

  Even in the context of a heated presidential campaign, that’s a remarkably incendiary accusation. It’s become a standard part of the McCain campaign rhetoric, uttered by surrogates and candidates alike.

  Gov. Sarah Palin’s remarks in Springfiled, Mo., are a good example: “Senator Obama says that he wants to spread the wealth, which means — you know what that means,” she said at a rally on Oct. 24, 2008. “It means that government takes your money, (handed) out however a politician sees fit. Barack Obama calls it spreading the wealth, and Joe Biden calls higher taxes patriotic. And yet to Joe the Plumber, he said it sounded like socialism. And now is not the time to experiment with socialism.”

  She has repeated the line in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and most recently in Leesburg, Va., on Oct. 27, 2008. It consistently evokes boos and jeers from a crowd protective of the American system of government.

  But is Palin stoking their anger honestly?

  Socialism refers most commonly to a system in which the government owns the means of production and distribution of goods. That is, the state truly is responsible for creating and spreading the wealth. Let’s look at the root of Palin’s claim — Obama’s Oct. 12, 2008, exchange with plumber Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, who has come to be known simply as Joe the Plumber — and see if that’s what Obama was suggesting.

  Wurzelbacher approached Obama on the street in his Holland, Ohio, neighborhood, and said he was close to buying a plumbing company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year. He complained that Obama would tax him more, punishing his success.

  Obama responded that he was raising the top tax rate so he could decrease taxes for those who make less than $250,000.

  “It’s not that I want to punish your success,” Obama said. “I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success too.”

  “Seems like you would be welcome to a flat tax then,” Wurzelbacher said.

  “You know, I would be open to it except for here’s the problem with a flat tax,” Obama countered. “You’d have to slap on a whole bunch of sales taxes on it. And I do believe that for folks like me who have worked hard but, frankly, also been lucky, I don’t mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress who I just met over there who — things are slow, and she can barely make the rent. Because my attitude is if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s going to be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re going to be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you. And right now, everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody. And I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

  So when Wurzelbacher brought up a flat tax, Obama responded by endorsing progressive taxation – the principle of taxing those with higher incomes at a higher percentage than those with lower incomes. And it is in that context that Obama said he wanted to “spread the wealth.”

  Progressive taxes do indeed spread the wealth a bit. But they do so much more modestly than government owning the means of production.

  Few serious policy makers — including McCain — consider progressive taxation socialist. In fact, on the Oct. 26, 2008 edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, McCain stood by a comment he made in 2000 that “there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more” in taxes when you “reach a certain level of comfort.”

  “You put into different, different categories of wealthier people paying, paying higher taxes into different brackets,” McCain told host Tom Brokaw, as if to say progressive taxes are a no-brainer.

  Indeed, progressive taxation has been a cornerstone of American tax policy since the federal government first collected an income tax in 1863. It was based on the Tax Act of 1862, which President Abraham Lincoln signed, and which imposed a “duty of three per centum” on all income over $600, and five percent on income over $10,000.

  Obama’s proposed top tax rate of 39.6 percent, (up from today’s 36 percent) is considerably higher than that. But it’s not particularly high in the context of modern times; as he pointed out to Wurzelbacher, it’s about what top earners paid in the Clinton years. In 1987, the top tax rate was 38.5 percent. In 1944, it was 94 percent for the highest portions of high incomes.

  So no, Obama’s tax increase on those making more than $250,000 would not represent a transformation of the U.S. system of government. His desire to “spread the wealth” through progressive taxation makes him no less a capitalist than McCain, or Lincoln. Palin’s allegation that Obama wants to “experiment with socialism” seems designed less to inform than to inflame.
  That’s Pants on Fire wrong.

• 4. Joe  |  October 30th, 2008 at 4:00 pm

  HA!!!

  McCain said that sounds “a lot like socialism” to many Americans. Palin has derided the Illinois senator as “Barack the Wealth Spreader.”

  “Barack Obama calls it spreading the wealth. Joe Biden calls higher taxes patriotic,” Palin told a crowd in Roswell, N.M., and elsewhere. “But Joe the Plumber and Ed the Dairyman, I believe they think it sounds more like socialism.

  “Friends, now is no time to experiment with socialism.”

  In Ohio, she asked, “Are there any Joe the Plumbers in the house?” To cheers, she said, “It doesn’t sound like you’re supporting Barack the Wealth Spreader.”

  McCain told a radio audience that Obama’s plan “would convert the IRS into a giant welfare agency, redistributing massive amounts of wealth at the direction of politicians in Washington.”

  “Raising taxes on some in order to give checks to others is not a tax cut; it’s just another government giveaway.”

  Yet again… blast Obama on one thing, but….

  In Alaska, residents pay no income tax or state sales tax. They receive a yearly dividend check from a $30 billion state investment account built largely from royalties on its oil. When home fuel and gas costs soared this year, Palin raised taxes on big oil and used some of the money to boost residents’ checks by $1,200. Thus every eligible man, woman and child got a record $3,269 this fall.

  “While the unique fiscal circumstances the state finds itself in at the end of this fiscal year warrant a special one-time payment to share some of the state’s wealth, the payment comes at a time when Alaskans are facing rising energy prices. High prices for oil are a double-edged sword for Alaskans. While public coffers fill, prices for heating fuel and gasoline have skyrocketed over the last six months and are now running into the $5- to $9-a-gallon range for heating fuel and gasoline across several areas of the state.”
  In an interview with The New Yorker last summer Palin explained that she would make demands of a new gas pipeline “to maximize benefits for Alaskans”:
  “And Alaska we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”

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