What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (22 page)

Higher taxes are the lifeblood of redistributionism, since they seize from the haves to give to the have-nots. The kooks are entitled to your money and assets, you see, because they are on a morally superior mission: while you might want your money for a better home or car or college tuition for your kids, the leftists want your money for their noble plan to reengineer the economy. You think they want you to have a family vacation? They don’t; they want more abortion clinics. You think they want you to build your own new swimming pool? They don’t; they want your money to rehabilitate a heroin junkie. You think they want you to have a bigger SUV to haul the soccer team? They don’t; they want a brand-new collection of sheer shirts named for Barney Frank.

For decades, they have cleverly cloaked their true mission in various ways. They have cast it in emotional terms to which it’s been difficult to object, using words such as the ubiquitous “fairness” and “doing what’s right” to protect “public servants” such as teachers, police officers, and firefighters. While trying to sell the nearly $500 billion “jobs” bill in October 2011, Biden suggested that if the bill weren’t passed, the number of violent crimes, including rape, would increase. Fear and guilt: these are the standard weapons in the Left’s rhetorical arsenal. In February 2010, while Harry Reid pushed for a $15 billion jobs bill, he suggested that without its passage, out-of-work men were more likely to beat their wives. Apparently, as the jobs bills get bigger and more expensive, so too does the heinous nature of the crimes that will be committed if they aren’t passed.

Leftists are fond of using the word “invest” as a euphemism for spending, but “investing” is not the role of government, except perhaps in building infrastructure. Obama has consistently invoked the word “invest” to make it sound like he’s confiscating your money for business-savvy purposes. How can you oppose higher taxes when he’s talking about the “investments” that need to be made in infrastructure, education, and job training? The word “invest” makes it sound like he’s treating your money as a true investment manager would. In the real world, however, if this government were a hedge fund, the “investment managers” would have been fired a long time ago. After all, wouldn’t you run for your life if you walked into a Wells Fargo bank and were greeted by Barack Obama holding a clipboard and pen? Jon Corzine, the leftist former senator and governor of New Jersey and top Obama fund-raiser, presided over an epic collapse of his securities firm, MF Global. Over $1.2 billion of client funds went missing, prompting the FBI to move in. Big-spending leftists know how to lose and waste money, not “invest” it.

Most Americans wouldn’t have a problem paying a reasonable tax rate—
if
government were a good steward of our money. There are certain collective goods and services that only government can provide—such as military defense, bridges and roads, and, locally, police forces and public schools. But over the years, government has blown through so much money on things it shouldn’t be involved in—from a Department of Homeland Security roundtable on “Deceptive Dating Tactics” in January 2012 to a $76 per person lunch at a 2011 Department of Justice conference—that it’s now broke and cannot afford the things it’s supposed to do. I mean, a $76 lunch? Really? Do people also leave the DOJ with a sweet swag bag, like they’ve just been to the
Vanity Fair
Academy Awards after-party? We know Attorney General Eric Holder wishes he were P. Diddy, but he’s more like Raj from
What’s Happening!!

During a 2008 primary debate, ABC News’ Charlie Gibson asked Obama if he’d raise the capital gains tax rate
even if he knew that cutting it would generate more revenue for the government
, as it did when Clinton had cut it. Obama responded that raising the tax, even if doing so would
reduce
revenue, might be warranted out of “fairness.”

What he was really saying was that to the kooks, raising taxes is not just about raising
revenue
, although they always need more of that. It’s really about raising
rates
in order to sock it to the wealthy. The redistributors are less concerned with how they bring in money to the Treasury than making sure they zap the “rich” no matter what. To the leftists, in the battle of rates versus revenue, hiking rates will win every time, despite the mountains of evidence that show that they could get more money into the government to fund their kook agenda from lower rates. It makes no logical or economic sense, but the leftists are driven by neither logic nor sense. Nobody ever got a job from a poor man. The leftists—particularly the Obama cabinet, which didn’t have a single member with private-sector experience—will not see that economic truth. They’re so ideologically blinded by their obsession with ever-higher taxes that not even Dr. Phil could talk them out of their addiction to other people’s money. The kooks love higher tax rates because they’re their most effective brute weapon of class warfare. Paint devil’s horns on the “rich,” then take them for everything they’ve got. And do it by force, by changing the tax code, enlarging existing redistributionist programs, and, whenever possible, creating new ones. While the leftists like to paint themselves as compassionate and empathetic and the Right as cold and greedy, the exact opposite is true: the Left is implacably greedy for everybody’s money. The United States of America has become the United States of Grand Larceny, with leftists prodding the bodies of every American in an attempt to determine whether we’ve devised some new biological way of hiding nickels and dimes from them. (Hence, ObamaCare.)

During the 2008 campaign, Obama toned down the class warfare rhetoric. Despite his years working in the class warfare trenches as a community organizer, where his job was to drive class divisions and resentment, Obama downplayed that part of his agenda. Instead, he cast himself as a unifying leader of the rich, poor, and middle classes. He glossed over the fact that the divisions he claimed he’d heal were the precise divisions he needed to engage in his redistributionist extravaganza. In 2008, most of the American people bought his “Mr. Unity” routine because they weren’t particularly focused on taxes or class divisions. That year, voters were less concerned about taxes than they had been in previous elections because they had enjoyed a fifteen-year-long respite from tax hikes. From Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase to Obama’s 2009 tax hike on cigarettes, Americans had not experienced a major federal tax increase. President George W. Bush’s two waves of cuts in marginal rates in 2001 and 2003 reduced taxes for everyone and also cut 13 million people on the lower end of the income scale from paying any federal income tax. If you’re paying less or no federal income taxes, you’re not particularly worried about them. Because more Americans across the entire economic spectrum could keep more of their own money, the poor man could feed his family better and the rich man could give the poor man a raise. That is, until Obama became president and empowered the poor man to rob the rich man. Pretty soon, the rich man will
be
the poor man, and we’ll
all
be sitting in one big crappy boat together.

Once president, Obama dispensed with the unifying rhetoric and began to wage full-frontal class warfare. At the outset, he hit out only at the “fat cat bankers on Wall Street” while waging a softer-sell class warfare on the rest of us. Higher taxes, he said, are “neighborly.” He invoked the biblical verse about being “our brother’s keeper,” which dovetailed with his earlier comment advocating “collective salvation.”

But this has never been about being your “brother’s keeper.” It’s always been about
keeping
your brother’s wealth. It has been about envy and about coveting what someone else once had. Obama even pretended to oppose higher taxes in the summer of 2009, when he said, “The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up—take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.” Amen! Oh wait. He didn’t mean it.

He went on to say, “These are tax cuts and changes in the tax credit system that are going to spur job creation and economic growth, and I’m proud that Democrats and Republicans worked with each other to get it done.” This was his way of forcing the GOP to share ownership of the bad economy: if the extension of the Bush tax rates succeeded in improving the economy, he would take the credit. But if they failed to do so, he’d be able to say, “See? We tried the lower rates the Republicans wanted and there’s been no discernible improvement in the economy.” Of course, a two-year temporary extension didn’t grant the kind of certainty businesses need to expand and hire. A short extension was better than a rate increase, but it would only lead to a continuation of the status quo. That, however, was an irrelevant point to Obama.

In that same press conference in which he croaked out that halfhearted praise for extending the Bush tax rates, Obama couldn’t help but hit his redistributionist default button. He alluded to the government-union clash in Wisconsin and said those union workers should not be “denigrated” or “vilified.” He continued: “I believe that … the concept of shared sacrifice should prevail. If all the pain is borne by only one group—whether it’s workers or seniors or the poor—while the wealthiest among us get to keep or get more tax breaks, we’re not doing the right thing.”

The class warrior in him burst out. He couldn’t wait to raise income taxes again so he could grow government even more—so much so that as soon as he had the opening again in 2011, he cheered their impending expiration at the end of 2012 and pushed for higher rates on those earning over $1 million per year. And in a vivid illustration of his pathology, it never occurred to him that the Bush tax rates had now become the
Obama
tax rates.

On August 4, 2011, Obama turned fifty years old. The usual birthday cards arrived from perennial favorites like Barbra Streisand, Kim Jong Il, Jay-Z, and Robert Mugabe. The day before, he celebrated by attending three reelection fund-raisers in Chicago. He had just come off an agreement with Congress to raise the debt ceiling by up to $2.4 trillion (More spending! Happy birthday, Barry!) and had begun to pound “millionaires and billionaires” for failing to “pay their fair share.” That night, he met separately with one hundred of his highest-roller donors, each of whom paid $35,800 per person for some face time with him. The package also included a chance to walk the Obama family dog, Bo, a pair of Barry’s sweaty gym socks, and a bag of dirty turnips from Michelle Obama’s organic garden. Obama, who had added $3,938,093,118,800 to the national debt as of that fiftieth birthday, told his wealthy pals that the government needed to spend more on everything from “wind turbine and electric cars” to “cures for cancer.”

Without missing a beat, he proceeded to hit those dastardly rich folk who needed to get with the “shared sacrifice” agenda. He struck out against “big money flooding the airwaves and slash-and-burn politics” as he stood in front of all that “big money” with his palm open, ready to accept their “big money” so he could “flood” those airwaves with ads pounding them. Remember when Obama pledged in 2008 to accept only public financing for his campaign? That lasted about five minutes before he threw those rules out the window and raked in unlimited amounts of money from sources big, small, and questionable. He made a similar about-face in early 2012 when he decided to embrace super PACs after spending nearly two years attacking them as “phony front groups” undermining our democracy. The man who rails constantly against the “rich” gushes over them when it’s time to campaign. After all, class warfare needs a steady bankroll.

It used to be that old-school class warriors would at least fake being “men of the people.” Today’s class warriors don’t even try to put on the act. Obama takes time out of his busy schedule of slamming those mustache-twirling “millionaires and billionaires” to hang with them on Martha’s Vineyard or the Costa del Sol. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg warns about possible economic riots as he examines his $18 billion bank account. Director Michael Moore fans the flames of class warfare as he counts his latest multimillion-dollar movie receipts. Actress Roseanne Barr calls for bankers to be limited to $100 million in personal wealth, forced into “reeducation camps,” and possibly even “beheaded” in between cashing her multimillion-dollar checks from the syndication of
Roseanne
. She finds the time to do all of this while dressed up like Hitler in her kitchen as she bakes Gingerbread Jew Men in the oven (yes, she actually did this). The new class warriors are class war provocateurs rather than actual combatants. It’s so dirty in the trenches! That’s for the union thugs. We’ll fight the class wars up here, from the pristine perches of the White House or our private jets or our rambling thirty-room mansions. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, you guys go fight the class wars. We’ll wash up.

The new class warriors are made up of two essential groups: those wanting ever-greater government help and those plagued with enough “rich guilt” to want to dole it out. So, how do you spot the ones plagued by rich guilt? Those class warriors drink white wine, wear hounds-tooth jackets, trade aromatherapy oils, and fantasize about Leon Trotsky naked on their Facebook pages. The new class warfare is designed to enforce socialist economic policies that would have zero chance of being adopted without the trumped-up class divisions.

Today’s class wars are not about grinding poverty and basic survival. Typical welfare recipients in America now generally receive a cell phone courtesy of the taxpayer lest they be caught in a food stamp emergency without the means to dial 911. Instead of economic deprivation, the modern class wars are about envy: demanding something that someone else has, regardless of how they earned it. America today is
not
run by an economic upper crust that pays no taxes and preys on the poor. In fact, the exact opposite is true: government spending on the less fortunate has never been higher, and the wealthy pay the vast majority of the taxes to support it. And yet, Obama and the kooks have invoked Alinsky rules to form class warfare battle lines like a demented version of the epic fight scene in
Braveheart
. Obama out in front, his face painted not blue but Maoist red and his army consisting of union brutes, former ACORN employees, members of the Nation of Islam, college kids, tofu-eaters, and Colin Powell. Gone was the softer rhetoric about how paying higher taxes was “neighborly” and “patriotic.” In its place was more authentic kook language about how the “rich” need to shoulder more of the burden of funding “economic justice.”