This Joe the Plumber thing wasn’t a fluke… It’s a pattern–
Barack Obama talks about redistributing wealth on WBEZ.FM in 2001.
Obama Bombshell Redistribution of Wealth Audio Uncovered:
Let it not be said that we were not warned.
Barack Obama warned us back in 2001:
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.
But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.
And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.
Hmm. It sounds like those meetings with Marxist Bill Ayers and those sermons by Black Liberation Theologian Jeremiah Wright rubbed off on The One.
It’s becoming more and more apparent that The Vapid One has absolutely no idea what the Constitution is about. And he was once a law professor?
Our government was designed to be limited in scope and power. This is also the core value of conservatives: there is an idealogical line that cannot be crossed. Once that line is crossed, a Pandora’s box is opened, with none of the things emerging from it good or desirable. Maximum personal freedom from the vast reach of a powerful central government is the central focus of our democratic republic. A weak (but not with respect to national defense) central government is the essential component of that focus.
However, the concept of a limited government is totally lost on Obama. He seems to think that Washington should be the ultimate authority in every aspect of everyone’s life.
I hate to burst your balloon, Barry, but I’m perfectly capable of conducting my life on my own. I know the difference between right and wrong. I also know that the desire to control someone else’s life is a form of mental illness, as evidenced in liberal Democrat’s rantings about imaginary wrongs and the need to fix them by more and more taxes and regulations.
Wake up people!! Remember the phrase “show me your friends and I’ll tell you who YOU are”! I don’t know if I want to know! I have seen his friends and I am not impressed. They have scary thoughts about society. Sure the Americans want change …but do they want DISASTER? This is a very dangerous gamble unless you don’t pay taxes,don’t have a job,are leaving the country (not to return) and then what do you have to loose? Alot! I believe! You are safe, may worship as you like etc.,etc. Wake up and stop this on Election Day! Did you ever wonder why Barrack has received so much money from the Arabs and he doesn’t want to drill ? Think about that when you’re at the pump!! DUH !
This is disturbing, I got this from the WSJ 10/23/08.
Are 401(k)s safe from congressional Democrats?
By JAMES TARANTO
If you have a 401(k) or equivalent retirement plan, you’ve probably been watching nervously the past few weeks as your nest egg has shrunken owing to the current turmoil in the markets.
Well, it could be worse. But don’t take heart, for what we mean is it could get worse. The market turmoil has some politicians on Capitol Hill eyeing the end of the 401(k) as we know it. Workforce Management reports on a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee earlier this month:
A plan by Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic-policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, contains elements that are being considered. . . .
Under Ghilarducci’s plan, all workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5 percent of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3 percent a year, adjusted for inflation.
The current system of providing tax breaks on 401(k) contributions and earnings would be eliminated.
“I want to stop the federal subsidy of 401(k)s,” Ghilarducci said in an interview. “401(k)s can continue to exist, but they won’t have the benefit of the subsidy of the tax break.”
Ghilarducci outlined her plan last year in a paper for the left-liberal Economic Policy Institute, in which she acknowledges that her plan would amount to a tax increase on workers making more than $75,000–considerably less than the $250,000 Barack Obama has said would be his tax-hike cutoff. In addition, workers would be able to pass on only half of their account balances to their heirs; presumably the government would seize the remaining half. (Under current law, 401(k) balances are fully heritable, although they are subject to the income tax.)
Sounds pretty unappealing, doesn’t it? But in her congressional testimony, Ghilarducci offered a sweetener:
Short-term I propose . . . that the Congress allow workers to swap out their 401(k) assets, perhaps at August levels, for a guaranteed retirement account–just a one-time swap. . . .
How would this work? You go back to your districts and meet up with a 55-year-old who had had $50,000 in his account last month and now has $40,000 in the account. He can swap out that $50,000, valued in August, for that guarantee of what would become, if he retires at 62, a $500 a month addition to Social Security.
A 55-year-old who lost 20% of his 401(k) because of the recent stock market decline was investing more aggressively than he should have, given his age. Ghilarducci proposes to reward this imprudence in exchange for dramatically limiting everyone’s ability to take risks (and enjoy the corresponding rewards) and for greatly increasing government control of Americans’ retirement funds.
It is by no means a certainty that Congress or a President Obama would embrace such a proposal, but this is a direction in which things may move if the Democrats make big gains next month.