John McCain said this morning that he wants to keep the money from possible drilling offshore in Florida for Floridians, which I'm fine with. However, Isn't that "redistributing" the wealth like Palin has done in Alaska? Working to give parts of the revenue of the oil drilling to Floridians who did nothing to earn that oil money other than to be Floridians? That's redistribution to use the broad definition that the McCain campaign is using against Obama that he's some kind of socialist. Shouldn't "Capitialist John" be advocating that the oil companies keep all the revenue? That's true, pure capitalism that McCain supposedly is a proud advocate of. Is he for the free market or not?Thanks go to my friend Shaw for this next part:
Republicans and their love of redistributing the wealth: The Obama campaign had the PERFECT answer given to them on a silver platter. I thought David Gergen on Anderson Coopers was brilliant when talking about this "issue." (TPJ: And David Gergen isn't some liberal sychophant. He's been a political advisor to Nixon, Ford and Reagan).
COOPER: It's certainly a question the McCain campaign has kind of been hammering at, portraying Obama as a socialist. You hear that on -- on the Palin campaign as well.Is it working?
GERGEN: They may be making some modest progress with it, Anderson. We did see some evidence of McCain coming up a point or two here and there. I don't think it's anywhere near close enough to win an election. And more importantly, I don't think the Democrats have really answered it appropriately. You know, Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was very much an advocate of what's called progressive taxation. And that is the rich pay more than the poor in terms of taxes.
Now, one of the most effective popular programs we've had in the last three decades. It's called the earned income tax credit. It's a program whereby, if you're a working person, a working couple and you're below the poverty line, the government will actually give you money. That's a redistributed program. It's a program which takes money from the upper classes and gives it to the lower -- to the working poor.
Now who started that program? The earned income tax credit? Ronald Reagan. It was one of the -- it was an achievement of the Reagan administration that Bill Clinton then built on. So I think that these arguments are -- you know, some of them get so carried away that they don't recognize the realities of what we've been going through in public policy and the big arguments about why the wealth over the last 30 years has been redistributed. It's been redistributed upwards.
Other Republican Presidents who supported "redistribution of wealth": "I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective: a graduated inheritance tax increasing rapidly with the size of the estate.”- Theodore Roosevelt. (TPJ: And McCain apparently thinks of himself as a Teddy Roosevelt Republican!!!)
“Every dollar spent by the government must be paid for either by taxes or by more borrowing with greater debt. The only way to make more tax cuts now is to have bigger and bigger deficits and to borrow more and more money. Either we or our children will have to bear the burden of this debt. This is one kind of chicken that always comes home to roost. An unwise tax cutter, my fellow citizens, is no real friend of the taxpayer."- Dwight D. Eisenhower
In 1986, Reagan signed legislation greatly increasing the earned income tax credit, a credit for low-income workers that reduces the impact of payroll taxes in order to boost take-home pay above poverty levels. When the credit is more than the amount of federal income taxes owed by an individual, that person receives a tax “refund.”“It's the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”- Ronald Reagan
TPJ: Even Adam Smith in his book "Wealth of Nations" (which is the economic bible for free marketeers) says, "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."
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1 comment:
Your claim that the earned income tax credit was created by the Reagan administration is incorrect.
The following is from The Encyclopedia of Taxation and Tax Policy from the Brookings institute. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=1000524
It was first introduced at the end of the Ford administration as an offset to social security taxes for low income tax payers. It was adopted into the tax code by President Carter in 1978 as part of the "revenue act". Under Reagan, the credit's pay out size did increase in 1984 under the deficit reduction Act and again under the Tax Reform Act of 1986. It has also been annexed for inflation since 1987.
"Analysis.
The earned income tax credit is an income transfer program that provides significant financial assistance to low-income workers, especially those with children. Unlike increasing the minimum wage, the expansion of the earned income credit over the past two decades has provided benefits targeted to help the working poor. Also, unlike most other welfare programs or a negative income tax, the earned income tax credit provides significant work incentives to low-income workers (Forman 1988: 67-77). Indeed, as currently structured, the earned income tax credit is one of the federal government's largest and most effective antipoverty programs."
These increases weren't give aways as you would have people believe. The "earned" income tax credit was just that. It rewarded low income people, especially with children, for working. President Reagan increased the amount people could "earn" and still receive the credit. So, I'm sure he recognized that if there had to be a welfare program one that rewarded work was better than having people sit at home all day receiving government handouts!
As for McCain wanting the people of Florida to receive money from oil drilling on public lands. This isn't wealth redistribution. Yes, capitalism is the way to go at all times and when the people get paid money, like share holders receiving a dividend, from another private company that is using a natural resource obtained from the land belonging to the people of the state of Florida or alaska or any other state to produce their product is Capitalism in it's purist form! Alaska, Florida, Texas, in fact all 50 states are sovereign states onto themselves. The states have no responsibility to the federal government or the people of other states. The oil obtained in Alaska or Florida whether on it's land or off it's shores is it's own and belongs to the people of that state! So for you to write that such a monetary payout to the citizens of said states for the sale of a natural resource to a private company is "wealth redistribution" shows an extreme lack of capitalistic ideals and theory. Let me ask you this. If it's "wealth redistribution" who exactly is being forced to give up their wealth to pay for the crude oil? Which people's monetary property is being taken from them involuntarily and given to the people of Alaska? Well, the answer is no one. In Alaska, the oil and Gas companies aren't being "forced" to give money to receive the natural resources. They "choose" to buy it from the state. They don't have to. That is called a transaction. "If you want this, then you'll have to give us that. If you don't want to then we are not selling." What the Obama administration wants to do in "spreading the wealth" is use the IRS tax code like a gun at people who actually earn their money through hard work and give it to lay abouts who don't! They use the threat of imprisonment through the IRS. You can not say no. That my friend is basic Socialist/Communist intimidation tactics and free will destruction!
Also, Adam Smith is not the modern Capitalists economist, F.A. Hayek and Austrian economics is.
Read below from the Library of economics and liberty about Hayek's view on the economic impact or lack thereof of socialist planning.
"In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hayek turned to the debate about whether socialist planning could work. He argued that it could not. The reason socialist economists thought central planning could work, argued Hayek, was that they thought planners could take the given economic data and allocate resources accordingly. But Hayek pointed out that the data is not a “given.” The data does not exist, and cannot exist, in any one mind or small number of minds. Rather, each individual has knowledge about particular resources and potential opportunities for using these resources that a central planner can never have. The virtue of the free market, argued Hayek, is that it gives the maximum latitude for people to use information that only they have. In short, the market process generates the data. Without markets, data are almost nonexistent.
Mainstream economists and even many socialist economists now accept Hayek’s argument. Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs noted: “If you ask an economist where’s a good place to invest, which industries are going to grow, where the specialization is going to occur, the track record is pretty miserable. Economists don’t collect the on-the-ground information businessmen do. Every time Poland asks, Well, what are we going to be able to produce? I say I don’t know.”
In 1944 Hayek also attacked socialism from a very different angle. From his vantage point in Austria, Hayek had observed Germany very closely in the 1920s and early 1930s. After he moved to Britain, he noticed that many British socialists were advocating some of the same policies for government control of people’s lives that he had seen advocated in Germany in the 1920s. He had also seen that the Nazis really were National Socialists; that is, they were nationalists and socialists. So Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom to warn his fellow British citizens of the dangers of socialism. His basic argument was that government control of our economic lives amounts to totalitarianism. “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest,” he wrote, “it is the control of the means for all our ends.”
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hayek.html
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