Socialism: good for banks, bad for working families.

[Warren Stupidity]

John McCain is now openly attacking Obama as a "socialist".


In an exchange recorded for posterity on a YouTube video, Obama told Wurzelbacher that in the economic crisis it would be good to "spread the wealth around."

"Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism," McCain says in his radio address. "And a lot of Americans are thinking along those same lines. In the best case, 'spreading the wealth around' is a familiar idea from the American left. And that kind of class warfare sure doesn't sound like a 'new kind of politics.'

McCain adds that the "spread the wealth" philosophy "would also explain some big problems with my opponent's claim that he will cut income taxes for 95 percent of Americans. You might ask: How do you cut income taxes for 95 percent of Americans, when more than 40 percent pay no income taxes right now? How do you reduce the number zero?

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/10/mccain_joe_the.html

In a month which has witnessed our public treasury starting to partially nationalize major financial institutions with our money, all with bipartisan blessing, it massively strange for McCain to be acting as if 'spreading the wealth around' which he believes is 'socialism' by changing the relative tax burden between people making less than 250,000 annually and those making more is wrong. It seems we can spread the wealth out to huge financial institutions, with some of that spread going directly to sustain huge bloated executive compensation packages. Working families can spread their hard earned dollars out to maintain the luxurious lifestyles of the truly rich. But strange is the hallmark of the McCain campaign: one strange stunt after another.

It is typical of the Republican Party to view any attempt to tilt tax and spending policies of the federal government more in favor of working families as an act of class warfare. It remains a mystery why a large proportion of working families agree with the Republican Party that the rich should pay less in taxes and they should pay more. The best explanation is that in their inner narrative they view themselves as soon to be among those, like the McCain family, who have income measured in millions of dollars, too many houses to keep track of, and teams of accountants and tax lawyers to keep their effective tax rate down around 5%.

It is hard to believe that the latest campaign stunt, personified by Joe (Sam) the (not) Plumber, which has now descended to calling Obama a socialist (without of course our ability to hold a national discourse on exactly what that means), can hold water while Wall Street is receiving billions in handouts. It is a tactic that relies on the american electorate having such severe mental problems that they cannot make the connection - cannot perceive the utter falsity of the posturing by McCain.