Which means that we have to stuff a flux capacitor into a Firebird rather than a DeLorean — but that we'll still have to stomach a lot of Yes and Chicago. I guess is the point.
[...] what Obama is really saying is this: "Let's go back to the 1970s." It was a Golden Age of Equality, with the top 1 percent's share of national income at its lowest level of the 20th century. And the nostalgia surely doesn't stop there. It was also a time of strong unions, expensive oil, regulated industry and high tax rates. This is exactly the Obamacrat agenda. Of course, the 1970s were also a time of economic chaos and stagflation that led voters in 1980 to reject Jimmy Carter by a crushing landslide. Yet Obama wants give that formula another shot.
[...] Back during the success-punishing 1970s, the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent. And guess what? Liberal economists such as Paul Krugman, Brad Delong and Peter Diamond — whose nomination by Obama to the Federal Reserve thankfully failed in the Senate — think the top tax rate should zoom back there again. More evidence that Clintonomics is dead in today's Democratic party. Then again, Obama, like many Democrats, never thought the Reagan tax cuts made much sense. As Obama wrote in "The Audacity of Hope: "The high marginal tax rates that existed when Reagan took office may not have curbed incentives to work or invest … but they did lead to a wasteful industry of setting up tax shelters." So the only downside was excessive tax planning?
[...] Here is the real record of cutting taxes and regulation: The U.S. economy grew at an average pace of 3.3 percent from 1983-2007, inflation — the scourge of the 1970s — was slayed, and the stock market rose by 1,400 percent. Median middle-class incomes rose by roughly 50 percent. (These numbers are even more impressive when you recall that heading in the 1980s, experts were predicting a dystopian, Solyent Greenesque, Age of Limits future for America.) Obama would be lucky to fail like this.
Sure, median middle-class income exploded. But still, others had more — and that's what the income inequality argument is all about: taking what others have and spreading it out evenly, even if that means we wreck the very process that allowed for that 50% real wealth increase.
The left wants us to envy the wealth of others rather than embrace the fruits of wealth production itself — by way of a proven economic system that raises the standard of living for even those at the bottom of the "income disparity" scale such that our poor mirror much of the world's "rich" (they have cars, DVD players, computers, flat screen tvs, shelter, food, etc.).
And it's all so they — rather than a disinterested and organic free market — can direct wealth. The free market system takes away the power of the central planner. Which is why the central planner has to kill the free market system to consolidate power.
That they use class warfare and emotional sophistry to gin up outrage in those their institutions have trained to be useful idiots is not surprising. But surprising or not, the totalitarian impulse must nevertheless be identified, illuminated, and soundly defeated — each and every time it rears its fork-tongued face.
To borrow from that great freedom fighter, Kyle Reese, "Listen, and understand. [Socialist Utopianism] is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. [Or at the very least, it's made you it's worker bitch].
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