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Last thing we need is to elect another income redistributionist who is even less qualified for the presidency than Obama

Just so you know: Obama's 'middle class economics' means wealth redistribution



Nothing actually happened in the news last night, but there was a speech by a guy who likes to make them in lieu of actually governing. A lot of people watched it for whatever reason. The State of the Union address hasn't been a serious exercise in governance for a long time - if it ever was.
The Constitution mandates that the president must from time to time report to Congress on the state of the union. It doesn't mandate that he do it in a big made-for-TV political ad for himself. But that's what it's turned into, and in fairness to Barack Obama, this happened long before he arrived on the scene. But Obama has taken it to a high art form, and never more so than last night, when he tried to take credit for everything from the passing of the 2008 financial crisis to an ISIS retreat that has occurred only in Obama's imagination. And above all else, Obama returned again and again to the theme of "middle class economics." Now this is a term that in a serious sense means absolutely nothing. Economics is not something that operates with one particular class of people in mind, and economic policy does not and cannot work that way. When Obama proposes massive new taxes on capital gains, while then turning around and proposing government transfer payments - oh, sorry, "middle class tax credits" - what he is really proposing is the redistribution of wealth. Ironically, this is merely doubling down on the same policies that have accomplished exactly the opposite for the past six years, as the Wall Street Journal explains:
White House aides are saying their boss’s plan for $320 billion in new taxes on savings and investment to finance more transfer payments is a bid to be remembered as a Robin Hood. This would be accurate if our hero and his merry men had shaken down Sherwood Forest for the benefit of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Mr. Obama has spent six years trying to redistribute income, but all he’s done is make the income gap between rich and poor wider. The nearby chart shows the real income of the median American household since 1984. Earnings soared 14.5% during the 1990s to $56,800, then dipped during George W. Bush ’s first term. They rebounded smartly in 2007 almost to the 1999 peak, and then plunged as expected amid the recession.

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The brutal difference of the Obama years is that incomes continued to fall and didn’t rebound with the recovery as they did in every other expansion. Only in 2013 did they finally pick up, ever so modestly. Wages stagnated despite—we’d say because of—a surge of economic ministration out of Washington. The Congressional Budget Office reports that total transfer payments to the middle 20% of taxpayers increased 25.9% on average between 2007 and 2011, the latest year for which data are available. The average tax liability for this group fell 24.4%. Yet their after-tax income nonetheless fell by 1.9% over the same period. That’s what happens with years of subpar economic growth. Mr. Obama now proposes to remedy this growing gap between the middle class and those he defines as the affluent by increasing the prosperity that flows to everyone. Sorry, just kidding. The President wants to double down on redistribution by nearly doubling the capital gains tax rate over its 2012 level to 28% for couples earning more than $500,000. The 2013 fiscal cliff deal boosted the top rate to 20% from 15%, plus the 3.8% ObamaCare surcharge on “unearned income.” It's happened this way because everyone suffers when you attack wealth, profits and capital formation under the guise of "fairness," and this is what Democrats do reflexively whenever they are lamentably given the opportunity to govern. The promise that the confiscated funds will reach and benefit the middle class never happens, because government cannot create lasting opportunity for anyone, nor can it change the habits and behaviors of those who had failed to access opportunity prior to the government's oh-so-generous reallocation. Take two people - one who has consistently earned wealth, one who has consistently failed to do so. Take a bunch of money from the first and give it to the second, so that each has the same amount of money as the other. Change nothing else. Wait a year. I can pretty much guarantee the first person will once again be far wealthier than the second. People determine their own destiny, despite the conceit of politicians who want to think it all comes down to them and what they do. None of this is going to happen, of course, and Obama knows that. The Republican Congress is not going to pass these proposals and they are not designed to pass. They are designed to define the rhetorical landscape and allow Obama to start and win an argument steeped in class warfare. Republicans would be wise not to take the bait. They need to change the terms of the debate and explain to the American people that wealth and capital formation benefit everyone who is willing to do the right things to take advantage of it. That, of course, is always the tricky part of the argument. There are always people left behind by a rising tide, and Democrats like to use this as evidence that the free market is fundamentally unfair. But the truth is that, given opportunity, some people will take advantage of it and some won't. Liberals think this means "the system is rigged." No. The system works for those who have the tenacity to keep pursuing opportunity. It will never work for those who don't, despite politicians' best attempts to simply hand them money in exchange for votes. If Republicans can make this case, they can not only gain the rhetorical upper hand in the current debate, they can change the way the nation looks at these things. And that couldn't come at a better time because the last thing we need is to elect another income redistributionist who is even less qualified for the presidency than Obama.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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