Testing the New President

Vice-president-elect Joe Biden issued a prescient warning in the last days of the presidential campaign: If Barack Obama were elected president, he would be tested by a major international crisis soon after taking office. Biden was wrong about one thing: The test has come even before President-elect Obama is sworn in.

Within hours of Obama's impressive victory, another new leader, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, warned that Russia would deploy short-range missiles capable of hitting NATO territory if the new American president goes ahead to build a missile defense system to protect Europe. It's unclear where a President Obama will come down on this issue. He's been on both sides during the campaign.

The idea of an anti-missile defense system, of course, is not new. The United States has been working on an anti-missile system to protect our territory since the Reagan administration. The Strategic Defense Initiative -- often derisively dismissed as "Star Wars" by its critics -- fundamentally changed the way the U.S. approached the idea of nuclear war.

Through much of the Cold War, the United States based its defense almost entirely on a good offense: mutually assured destruction (MAD). We would have so many weapons that the Soviets would realize that an attack on us would be suicidal. If they launched a surprise nuclear attack on us, enough of our missiles would survive to retaliate against them, and annihilation would be the fate of both sides.

But Reagan changed the equation. Essentially abandoning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which allowed the Soviets and the U.S. to set up anti-missile systems to protect only their two capitals, Reagan announced he would explore building a defense shield to protect the entire country.

Some 20 years later, U.S. technology in this area has advanced to the point that we are capable of deploying a limited system to protect our allies. Last year, the U.S. announced that negotiations were under way with some of our friends in Europe to deploy anti-missile systems on their territory. For some of those allies, the primary threat they fear is a nuclear-armed Iran. Although, Poland, with whom we've now signed an agreement, also fears a newly belligerent Russia. But the Bush administration has been at pains to reassure an insecure Russia that any American-deployed system would be purely defensive -- a so-called "hit-to-kill" strategy in which a missile's technology would not even include explosives but would rely on intercepting a nuclear missile before it hit its target.

Russia has now made it clear to the incoming president: Move ahead with deploying 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic and we will deploy short-ranged missiles near Poland. So what will our new president do? The last time Russia flexed its considerable muscle by invading Georgia, candidate Obama at first acted as if both sides were equally to blame. He later righted himself, condemning Russia as the aggressor.

President-elect Obama is busy with preparations for the transition to his new office. But the Russians won't wait -- and neither will our enemies. Obama must signal that there will be no major shifts in American foreign or defense policy, irrespective of all the campaign rhetoric about change. He could do so by quickly announcing his picks for secretaries of state and defense. I doubt Colin Powell wants another term at state, but perhaps he would view defense as a new challenge. At the very least, such a choice would inform Russia that despite partisan wrangling in election years, the United States remains committed to protecting our allies and ourselves, and a President Obama has no plans to change that.

A Real Election Choice On The United Nations

When Barack Obama said he'd like to "spread the wealth around," he was widely understood to be talking about redistributing income within the U.S. But there's another arena in which Obama fans are waiting impatiently for the promised wealth-spreading--the United Nations.

Officially, under its 1945 charter, the U.N. is a neutral body that takes no sides in U.S. politics. But a recent story in the Washington Post, headlined "At the U.N., Many Hope for an Obama Win," reports the same drumbeat I've been hearing from the U.N.'s New York headquarters. There's little love lost there for John McCain, who replies to the U.N.'s chronic scandals and tyrant-friendly tilt by proposing some competition, via a League of Democracies.

Obama, by contrast, promises to give the U.N. a bigger role in U.S. foreign policy and many more American tax dollars than the $5 billion or more per year that currently accounts for roughly one-quarter of the total U.N. budget--already the biggest share by far among the U.N.'s 192 member states.

A disturbing caveat here is that the total annual U.N. budget is something of a mystery even to the U.N., which produced an estimate two years ago of $20 billion. That has since grown, but the U.N. either won't or can't say by how much.

Cocooned in diplomatic immunities, and spent across borders, the U.N. budget is multilayered, secretively administered, erratically audited and often filtered through multiple U.N. agencies that charge fees to each other. These days, in the name of "public-private partnerships," it is also opaquely intertwined with assorted private foundations and corporations worldwide.

The danger here is not only graft and waste but the ease with which the U.N. collective, with its majority of nonfree member states, lends itself to support for dictatorships, money laundering and questionable transfers of technology and goods to rogue regimes (all of which emerged in investigations into both the U.N.'s 1996-2003 Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, and its more recent Cash-for-Kim scandal in North Korea).

Obama has yet to put forward a viable plan for holding the U.N. accountable. But he's already promising to embrace a massive U.N. program called the Millennium Development Goals, saying "When I'm president, they will be America's goals." This U.N. program in effect sets U.N.-approved central planning targets for poor countries and urges developed countries to pay for it by handing over 0.7% of gross national product--in effect, a direct tax levied by the U.N.

Obama is promising upfront that by 2012 he'd be tossing at least $50 billion a year into this pit. If, as president, he signs onto the full U.N. program, the tab for American taxpayers over the next four years could total well over $300 billion.

With the pale exception of Japan (the number two financial donor after the U.S.), America has been the only U.N. member state to even try to impose serious oversight on the U.N. Almost the entire U.S. effort came from a now-departed team brought to the U.S. mission in 2005 by former Ambassador John Bolton, and a few Republican members of Congress, chiefly Sen. Norm Coleman and the late Rep. Henry Hyde. Coleman, a former prosecutor who put himself on the line to uncover U.N.-related nests of money laundering, graft and abuse, is now running for re-election in Minnesota--where he might lose his seat to comedian Al Franken.

U.N. reforms proclaimed with fanfare in recent years have fizzled. A policy of financial disclosure by top U.N. officials, promised by Kofi Annan, has turned out to require no public disclosure whatsoever. A system-wide audit promised by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in early 2007 was scaled back within the week to a tardy and off-site audit of a portion of the U.N.'s operations in North Korea.

A special task force set up almost three years ago to investigate U.N. procurement activities has identified at least 20 major cases of fraud, kickbacks and malfeasance tainting a total of more than $630 million worth of contracts. But this probe is due to be shut down by the end of this year, leaving behind at least 150 unfinished investigations.

Given the current U.N. scene, it's not just Joe the Plumber who comes to mind. American taxpayers might want to recall the fate of Boxer the horse, in George Orwell's Animal Farm, whose mantra as he slaved in the name of the collective good was "I must work harder"--right up until he was carted away to the glue factory.

Obama's New Tax Welfare

Barack Obama’s supposed tax cut for 95% of American workers is meant to draw attention from the real core of the Obama tax plan – proposed increases in every major federal tax:

--Obama proposes to raise the top two individual income tax rates by 25% or more, both through explicit rate increases, and the phaseout of personal exemptions and all itemized deductions for these upper income earners;

--Obama proposes to increase the capital gains tax rate by 33%;

--Obama proposes to increase the tax rate on dividends by 33%;

--Obama proposes to raise the top payroll tax rate by between 16%--32%;

--Obama proposes a new payroll tax on employers to help pay for national health insurance, estimated at around 7%;

--Obama proposes to reinstate the death tax, which is being phased out under current law, with a new top marginal tax rate of 45%;

--Even though American companies already face the second highest marginal tax rates in the industrialized world, Obama’s tax plan provides for increasing the corporate tax burden by another 25%, “by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens”;

--Obama’s protectionist trade policies even suggest higher tariff taxes.

It’s the Incentives, Stupid

Obama argues that only higher income workers and rich corporations will suffer these tax increases, and they can afford it. But tax and economic policy is not about who “can afford it”, an uninformed and socially retrograde sentiment. It is precisely the increase in these marginal tax rates that greatly harms the economy, because the incentives are turned against savings, investment, entrepreneurship, business expansion, job creation, work, and economic growth. With higher marginal tax rates, the reward for these pro-growth economic activities is reduced, and so these activities decline.

These incentives affect not just higher income people, and all the resources they control, and corporate employers and all their capital, and small businesses who would suffer the individual income tax rate increases. They also affect everyone who plans to be in these upper income precincts someday, or who strives to get there, or who may be trying to gain capital investment from people with money for their own small business, like Joe the Plumber, or who is looking to get a job, which usually only comes from business people with money. Through the effect of these incentives throughout the economy, everyone will be harmed by Obama’s tax increases.

Ireland adopted a 12.5% corporate tax rate 20 years ago, when it suffered the second lowest per capita GDP in the European Union (EU). Its economy boomed as a result, and today Ireland enjoys the second highest per capita GDP in the EU. This is the effect on the middle class and working people of sound tax policy and the resulting incentives. Ireland with its 12.5% rate raises 50% more corporate tax revenue as a percent of GDP than the U.S. does with its 35% federal corporate tax rate.

Yet Barack Obama laughs at McCain’s proposal to reduce that corporate rate to 25%, the minimum needed to restore international competitiveness for U.S. companies and employers, mocking it as still more tax cuts for rich corporate fat cats. The EU as a whole has reduced its corporate tax rate in the last 10 years from 38% to 24% on average. Canada has just adopted a 19.5% rate, with a 15% rate phasing in. Germany has also recently adopted a19% corporate rate. How are American companies supposed to provide good jobs at high wages with this crippling tax disadvantage? Unfortunately, Obama remains hopelessly mired in his prep school Marxism, which was not remedied by his Ivy League miseducation.

Obama’s tax plan is exactly the opposite of the supply side economics that Reagan adopted, which produced the astounding boom of the 1980s. That boom, in fact, lasted 25 years, from 1982 to 2007, as Art Laffer and Steve Moore discuss in their new book The End of Prosperity. Laffer and Moore explain that more wealth was produced during those 25 years than in the previous 200 years of American history.

Obama’s tax plan is also exactly the opposite of President Kennedy’s tax policies, which produced another astounding boom in the 1960s. Pursuing the exact opposite policies from Kennedy and Reagan will produce exactly the opposite results.

Note also that Obama’s tax increases will not produce nearly enough revenue to finance all his lavish spending proposals, as shown in particular by a brilliant new paper from Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute. Do you think that after all those years of swimming in a sea of left wing extremism with Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and ACORN and the Saul Alinsky folks, that when he finally gets to the White House he is going to give up on his Big Government neo-socialism? Or is he going to start imposing huge tax increases on more and more people?

Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 promising a tax cut for the middle class. But after he was elected he quickly dropped that idea, and adopted tax increases for people making as little as $20,000 per year. What happened to fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me?

Obama’s Tax Cut

But Obama has the country mesmerized again in PT Barnum Act II with his supposed tax cut for 95% of Americans. Notice how no one ever asks the Messiah exactly what tax cut is he talking about? Indeed, the last person to ask Obama the Munificent a tax question was Joe the Plumber, and we all know what happened to him. The New York Times ran his tax returns on the front page.

Obama’s tax plan specifies that this tax cut is a $500 per worker income tax credit for workers making up to $75,000 per year, and for families making up to $150,000. I dispute that this would cover 95% of all Americans, but there are more important points.

Such a tax credit is a simple giveaway, like George McGovern’s 1972 promise of a $1,000 check for everyone, which the American people then rejected as a crass vote-buying scheme. It does nothing to improve the economy because it does nothing to change marginal tax rates or incentives. Indeed, it would hurt the economy on net because the credit will be phased out at higher income levels, which would effectively raise marginal tax rates again at those higher incomes. (As you earn more, you suffer a penalty in the phase out of the credit, which has the exact same effect on incentives as a tax rate increase).

In addition, McCain has actually proposed a hefty agenda of tax cuts for the middle class, far more substantial than a $500 per worker tax credit. McCain has proposed to increase the dependent’s exemption from $3,500 to $7,000. That would cut taxes for middle class families in the 25% income tax bracket by $875 per child. This would not boost the economy either because it also does not reduce marginal tax rates and so change incentives. But it does promote families having more children, which is also good for America in the long run.

McCain also proposes a tax credit of $5,000 per family and $2,500 per single worker for purchasing health insurance. This is a huge tax cut for the middle class, $1.3 trillion over 10 years. As Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation says, “This tax provision has a bigger impact on cutting people’s taxes than any single proposal from either party.”

McCain proposes as well to eliminate a huge pending tax increase for the middle class under current law by abolishing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). The AMT is slated to grow to impose a trillion dollar increase on the American people in future years, burdening 25 million middle class families. Abolishing the AMT would save middle class families a pending tax increase of $2,700 on average per year, another middle class tax cut of $60 billion each year from current law.

Most importantly of all, McCain’s tax plan also includes pro-growth tax cuts that provide exactly the shot in the arm the economy needs right now, exactly the opposite of Obama’s tax plan. The reduction in the federal corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% is a marginal tax rate reduction which would probably not lose any significant revenue overall on net because American companies are so stymied now by the uncompetitive 35% rate. McCain would also make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which would keep income tax rates, capital gains tax rates, and dividend tax rates from rising, and he would still vastly reduce the death tax from its pre-Bush levels. He would also reduce taxes on savings and investment through expensing of capital investment. Abolishing the AMT is another pro-growth tax cut that would prevent additional marginal tax rate increases.

These pro-growth tax cuts would do far more for the middle class and working people than a $500 per worker tax credit. They would reverse the current economic downturn, restoring economic growth, creating jobs, and reviving income and wage growth. They would “spread the wealth around” by creating prosperity for working people and the middle class, not by stealing from those who have already produced their own wealth.

Obama’s New Tax Welfare

The top 1% of income earners now pay 40% of all federal income taxes, almost twice their share of national income. The top 20% pay 86%. Clearly, federal income taxes are now paid primarily by these upper income taxpayers.

The bottom 40% of income earners as a group pay no federal income taxes on net. Instead they actually receive payments from the income tax system equal to 3.8% of all federal taxes paid. The middle 20% of income earners, the true middle class, pays 4.7% of all federal income taxes.

This is the result of Reagan Republican supply side economics that began with Reagan and Jack Kemp in the 1970s and 1980s, through Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America, to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Reagan and his Republicans have abolished federal income taxes on the working class. Moreover, they have almost abolished federal income taxes on the actual middle class (the middle 20%). Indeed, the tax cuts proposed by McCain would probably eliminate most of the remaining tax liability of the middle class.

When Obama insists that he wants all of his tax increases for upper income workers because of fairness, he is reflecting the ignorance of his own left wing extremism, and of the left wing nutcase base to which he is appealing. If the top 1% is already paying 40% of federal income taxes, and the top 20% are already paying almost of all of them, how is increasing their tax burdens further promoting fairness?

Moreover, Obama cannot cut federal income taxes for working people and the middle class where Reagan and his Republicans have already eliminated federal income taxes for them.

Nevertheless, besides his $500 per worker tax credit, Obama proposes a slew of additional refundable income tax credits targeted towards low and moderate income people, precisely those who pay little or no federal income taxes now. The term “refundable” means that if the worker does not have enough tax liability to take advantage of the credit, the government sends the worker a check to cover the full amount of the credit anyway. Obama proposes such tax credits for child care, education, housing, retirement, health care, welfare, and other giveaways.

Such credits would primarily not reduce tax liability, but, rather, would primarily involve checks from the federal government for these purposes. Consequently, they are not tax cuts. They are new federal spending programs hidden in the tax code. This is why I call it The New Tax Welfare. These new tax welfare programs alone would cost an additional $1.3 trillion over 10 years.

The Obama campaign is dishonest when it says these credits somehow offset payroll taxes. None of these credits, including the $500 per worker credit, involve any reduction in payroll taxes. They are refundable income tax credits, not payroll tax cuts. If Obama wants to reduce payroll taxes, let him propose an actual payroll tax cut, and then explain to the country how we are going to finance Social Security benefits.

Such cash grant tax credits again would do nothing to help the economy. Indeed, they would hurt the economy because the credits are again phased out as income grows into and beyond the middle class, actually effectively raising marginal tax rates for these middle class and upper middle class taxpayers.

The Obama tax plan is consequently precisely the opposite of tax reform. Instead of closing loopholes and lowering rates, he is creating new loopholes and raising the rates. Raising the top marginal tax rates for every major federal tax, and adopting $1.3 trillion in new tax welfare tax credits, could not be dumber, more counterproductive, anti-growth tax policy. This is not going to benefit 95% of Americans. It is going to leave all Americans poorer and worse off.

Obama Plane Pitches Reporters From McCain-Endorsing Papers

Journalists from three major newspapers that endorsed John McCain have reportedly been booted from Barack Obama's campaign plane for the final leg of the presidential race.

The Washington Times reported Friday, October 31st, that it was notified of the Obama campaign's decision Thursday evening -- even though the paper has covered Obama from the start.

Executive Editor John Solomon advised that the Obama campaign said it didn't have enough seats on the plane, but "I don't think the explanation makes sense to us."

"We've been traveling since 2007 with him. ... We're a relevant newspaper -- every day we break news," Solomon said. "And to suddenly be kicked off the plane for people who haven't covered it as aggressively or thoroughly as we are ... it sort of feels unfair."

He said the newspaper protested but was turned down again by the campaign.

"I can only hope that the candidate who describes himself as wanting to unite the nation doesn't have some sort of litmus test for who he decides gets to cover the campaign," Solomon said, noting that the Obama campaign's decision came just two days after the paper endorsed McCain.

The New York Post and Dallas Morning News also have been kicked off Obama's plane, according to the Web site The Drudge Report. It said the three reporters were told to find alternative transportation by Sunday so that the plane could accommodate "network bigwigs" and reporters from two black magazines, Essence and Jet.

Why does this remind me of Hugo Chavez?

Barack Obama's Biggest Lie...

He's told many a whopper this campaign season, but yesterday I saw coverage of portions of three different rallies. At each one he kept invoking the same thing.

"For the last eight years - we kept giving more and more to the wealthiest among us."

Now wait a second. Argue all you want about what percentage of graduated tax rates should or should not be.

But no one GAVE the wealthy earners anything...

They earned high salaries, because they held jobs that PAID them high salaries. In other words they put in a full days effort, and because they had the right experience, know how, intellectual capacity, and abilities - they convinced the companies they worked for to pay them "X" amount of dollars for those hours of service rendered. (Just like Michelle Obama did when the little scandal about her position at the public hospital had never paid more than $180,000 per year, but somehow she was able to get them to pay her $300,000 plus.)

Know how, experience, network, and capacity are all marketplace commodities and one SHOULD be able to make more money than someone else if they know the job better, have done it successfully, and achieve the objectives set before them.

Nonetheless - those people are still WORKING for what they get. And to think, as Barack Obama has been saying publicly for the last few days, that the American people were giving tax dollars to those earning in the top percentage is just a LIE!

Those people still pay MORE taxes than anyone else. And under the slightly reduced tax burden that they've enjoyed under the Bush economic plan - they still created more jobs, and more wealth for many additional citizens by re-investing their earnings into the workplace as well.

When THE ONE says "taking from the poor, and giving to the rich" he is flat out, 100% telling falsehoods, he knows it.

Further he doesn't care about truth and has not for months now...

Further his economic plan will bring about ruin to the poor people he has promised hope and change to - and he is either too dumb, or too dishonest to know it.

Neither scenario is especially hopeful in these challenging economic times.

Trick or Treat

AN OBAMA PANIC?

Barack Obama has remained cool and confident amid the financial melt down, even as John McCain at times has been embarrassing, lurching from one proposal to the next. But while the polls are reflecting Obama's steady hand, the markets haven't. In fact, they're getting worse by the day as Obama's lead widens.

Most investors know the devil is in the details - and the details of Obama's economic plans are anything but reassuring.

Of course, the market turmoil is first a reflection of grim reality - the bursting of the housing bubble and the billions upon billions in writedowns and losses that have forced upon the hugely leveraged financial firms companies that had cranked big profits during the bubble years.

The resulting credit crunch is hitting Main Street harder than ever before. The country is headed for recession; the only question is: Just how low can the markets and economy go?

It could be a lot lower - it all depends on the policies of the next president.

And, as it looks increasingly likely that Obama will be that man, the markets are casting a vote of "no confidence."

To be fair, McCain hardly instills confidence among the Wall Streeters. Why has his campaign spent time focusing on Obama's friendship with former terrorist William Ayers - when it should be hitting Obama's blind loyalty to policies that bring together the worst elements of Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter?

Recently, Obama said he wants to expedite loans to small businesses, so he seems to have a clue that they produce much of the country's job growth. Yet his income-tax hike on upper brackets will hit vast numbers of small businesses - they'd face the highest rates they've seen in decades.

Overall, his plan includes some of the most lethal tax increases imaginable, including a jump in the capital-gains rate. He'd expand government spending massively, with everything from new public-works projects to increases in foreign aid to a surge in Afghanistan - plus hand out a token $500 welfare check that he calls a tax cut to everyone else.

This is clearly the wrong way to go in the wake of an economic meltdown - yet Obama, for all his talk of how willing he is to compromise, of how he'd bring people together, is sticking to his tax guns.

At least one top Wall Street executive, an Obama supporter from the start of his campaign, who has recently urged Obama to rethink his tax plan - and that was before last week's record losses on the Dow.

But if Obama is rethinking, he's not saying. As his running mate, Joe Biden tells us that it's patriotic to pay higher taxes, Obama remains committed to squeezing businesses even if the recession grows.

The closest evidence I could find of compromise from Obama on taxes came in a June interview with CNBC, when he said: "Some of those [tax hikes] you could possibly defer. But I think the basic principle of restoring fairness to our economy and encouraging bottom-up economic growth is important."

It's easy to understand why so many in the media have fallen head over heels for Obama. He's smart, ambitious and cool under pressure. But what is he really like under the surface?

Some reckon that a President Obama won't go through with his plans. They look at his (thin) record and see a wimp who's never taken a firm stand on much of anything, much less enacting tax hikes during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

I look at Obama's record differently. From his days as a community activist, to his years in the Illinois Senate and now his brief time in the US Senate, he has shown little inclination to deviate from his party's tax-and-spend orthodoxy.

And if he governs like a liberal ideologue - with a belief that the government that works best is the one that's biggest and raises taxes the most - he won't even have to work hard to get his way. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won't stop him - the Democratic majorities in Congress are only likely to grow.

And the markets know this - even if pundits (even many of the financial ones) refuse to face it.

No one can blame the faltering stock market solely on Obama's tax plans or McCain's own inanity on economic issues. But stock prices reflect current market conditions plus best guesses of what's coming down the road. And I keep hearing nervous traders and investors talk about "a lack of leadership from Washington."

Obama Tells the Truth on Taxes

An unscripted moment with an Ohio plumber produced a startling confession from Barack Obama Sunday: The Democrat's "middle-class tax cut" is in fact a scheme to "spread the wealth around."

Obama dropped the mask long enough to tell the truth to Toledo plumber Joe Wurzelbacher - who had asked the Democratic nominee why he wanted to jack up his taxes just for "fulfilling the American dream."

"I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year," Wurzelbacher had told Obama. "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?"

"It's not that I want to punish your success," Obama replied. "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success, too . . . When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

At last! The truth outs!

Obama's plan isn't about sinking hooks into Wall Street CEOs and other fat cats, as he usually says. Fact is, there's not enough of them to raise the cash necessary to finance his other grand plans.

No, to do that, he'll have to go after ambitious working-class guys like Wurzelbacher - who's been a plumber for 15 years and is looking to better himself and his family while just maybe creating a few jobs.

The American Dream?

Wurzelbacher personifies it - but Barack Obama seems determined to tax it to death and be done with it, period.

That's been the case all along, of course. What's different is that the Democrat finally said so.
Heretofore, Obama has sought to paint himself as a tax-cutter - claiming he'll slash taxes for 95 percent of Americans.

As we have noted see "Obama - The Fairy-tale Candidate", that's a flat-out lie - not least because nearly half of all tax filers pay no income tax at all. So how can he "cut" their taxes if they don't pay any to begin with?
Answer: tax "credits."

To wit, in part:
* A $1,000 "make work pay" credit.
* A $4,000 college-tuition credit.
* A $6,000 child-care credit.
* A $1,100 bump in the earned-income tax credit.

These aren't to be income-tax deductions - which would be worthless to those who pay no income taxes.

These are to be checks from Washington - with the subsidies expected to grow to more than $1 trillion in 10 years.

That's a massive transfer of wealth. How does Obama justify it? "Fairness," he says.
But that's an absurdly radical view of what's "fair."

Remember, Obama's tax hikes target folks who already bear the brunt of the burden: The top 20 percent of earners already pay 69 percent of all federal taxes - and 88 percent of income taxes.

(Contrast that with John McCain's call yesterday for real tax cuts - halving the capital-gains levy, scrapping taxes on unemployment benefits altogether - designed to prime the economic pump.)
Monday, Obama promised a tax policy that would restore "a sense of fairness and balance that will give every American a fair shot at the American dream."

But just a day before, he told Joe Wurzelbacher the truth: No American dream for you, buddy!
Nor anybody else, it seems.

Obama Distorts ACORN Ties

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been forced to revise statements about their candidate's work for the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, a liberally-leaning non-profit roiled in allegations of voter registration fraud.
Obama’s website “Fight the Smears,” designed to counteract misinformation about the candidate’s record, contained false information about Obama’s connections to ACORN.

Before news outlets reported Obama worked as an ACORN trainer in 1992, the website said, “Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.” The website later revised their “fact” to say: “Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.”

The conservative leaning blog Gateway Pundit published archived screenshots of the Fight the Smears site showing the discrepancy.

As a presidential candidate Obama has extensive ties to the group currently being accused of voter registration fraud in 11 states. He is the first national candidate ever to hire ACORN for get-out-the-vote activities. Obama’s campaign paid $800,000 to a subsidiary of the liberally-leaning non-profit Association of Community Organizers for Reform called Citizens Services Incorporated campaign to increase voter turnout, but initially did not properly disclose this information on financial disclosure reports.

The Obama campaign said it hired CSI to do “polling, advance work and staging events” according to reports submitted to the FEC during the Democratic primary. The FEC later said the Obama campaign needed to disclose ACORN was engaging in get out the vote activities last August. At the time the Obama campaign called the mistake a “clerical error.”

Obama sought ACORN’s endorsement in the Democratic primary telling ACORN members, “Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.” “Project Vote” is the name ACORN’s voter registration drives are called. Obama worked for Project Vote for a period of roughly seven months in 1992.

ACORN endorsed Obama for president in February 2008. Before becoming a member of the Illinois State Senate, Obama represented ACORN in a lawsuit to help push for “Motor Voter” laws to make it easier for low-income persons to vote. Later, as director of the Woods Fund and Chairman of the Board of Chicago Annenberg Challenge Obama helped steer funds to ACORN through various grants.

Obama, Take From the Plummer, Give to the Bum

Obama Tells a plumber he's going to share his wealth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNuqV7N_bj0

Barack ACORN Obama Facts

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is the first national candidate ever to hire ACORN, a controversial non-profit accused of voter fraud across the country, to conduct get out the vote activities for his campaign.

Obama’s campaign paid $800,000 to a subsidiary of the liberally-leaning non-profit Association of Community Organizers for Reform called Citizens Services Incorporated campaign to help increase voter turnout.

This information, however, was not properly disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. The Obama campaign said it hired CSI to do “polling, advance work and staging events” according to reports submitted to the FEC during the Democratic primary.

The FEC said the Obama campaign needed to disclose ACORN was engaging in get out the vote activities last August. At the time, the Obama campaign called the mistake a “clerical error.”

ACORN has been accused of voter fraud in 15 states this election cycle.

Obama has close ties to the organization. Before becoming a member of the Illinois State Senate, Obama represented ACORN in a lawsuit to help push for “Motor Voter” laws to make it easier for low-income persons to vote.

Later, as director of the Woods Fund and Chairman of the Board of Chicago Annenberg Challenge Obama helped steer funds to ACORN through various grants. Obama sought ACORN’s endorsement in the Democratic primary telling ACORN members, “Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

“Project Vote” is the name ACORN’s voter registration drives are called. Obama worked for Project Vote for a period of roughly seven months in 1992.

ACORN endorsed Obama for president in February 2008.