The Goal Is Redistribution
Posted: December 3, 2012
Now that the way has been safely paved for Barack Obama’s re-election, the mainstream press feels freer to let us in the hinterlands know what’s really in the president’s heart.
That’s what The Washington Post’s Zachary Goldfarb did last week. The president, he wrote, may be a pragmatist in his governing style, but the “bedrock belief” that has driven him since a well-traveled childhood is that government should be used expansively to reduce income inequality. In other words, he wants to redistribute wealth.
This hardly comes as news to anyone who leans right of center. That cat is now clearly out of the bag. As Mr. Goldfarb noted, one merely has to read Mr. Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” to understand his true intentions. “My travels,” the future president wrote in 1995, “made me sensitive to the plight of those without power and the issues of class and inequalities as it relates to wealth and power.”
Two of the president’s key legislative victories in his first term — the “stimulus” and ObamaCare — were not about solving immediate problems, the article says, but about addressing the ultimate problem with our society: income inequality.
For instance, buried within the health-care law are “surcharges on upper-income earners” that will, according to a study cited by Mr. Goldfarb, add between $400 and $800 to the disposable income of lower-income Americans. This was not unintended.
Had enough? Well, there’s more. The president’s most recent budget calls for $2.6 trillion in increased spending over the next decade — or $1 trillion more than he has said he wants in new taxes. Any guesses as to the ultimate destination of this huge wad of “other people’s money”?
That’s what The Washington Post’s Zachary Goldfarb did last week. The president, he wrote, may be a pragmatist in his governing style, but the “bedrock belief” that has driven him since a well-traveled childhood is that government should be used expansively to reduce income inequality. In other words, he wants to redistribute wealth.
This hardly comes as news to anyone who leans right of center. That cat is now clearly out of the bag. As Mr. Goldfarb noted, one merely has to read Mr. Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” to understand his true intentions. “My travels,” the future president wrote in 1995, “made me sensitive to the plight of those without power and the issues of class and inequalities as it relates to wealth and power.”
Two of the president’s key legislative victories in his first term — the “stimulus” and ObamaCare — were not about solving immediate problems, the article says, but about addressing the ultimate problem with our society: income inequality.
For instance, buried within the health-care law are “surcharges on upper-income earners” that will, according to a study cited by Mr. Goldfarb, add between $400 and $800 to the disposable income of lower-income Americans. This was not unintended.
Had enough? Well, there’s more. The president’s most recent budget calls for $2.6 trillion in increased spending over the next decade — or $1 trillion more than he has said he wants in new taxes. Any guesses as to the ultimate destination of this huge wad of “other people’s money”?