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Comrade Obama?

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 2, 2008

If Barack Obama is not a socialist, he does the best imitation of one I've ever seen.

Under his tax plan, the top 5 percent of wage-earners have their income tax rates raised from 35 percent to 40 percent, while the bottom 40 percent of all wage-earners, who pay no income tax, are sent federal checks.

If this is not the socialist redistribution of wealth, what is it?

A steeply graduated income tax has always been the preferred weapon of the left for bringing about socialist equality. Indeed, in the "Communist Manifesto" of 1848, Karl Marx was himself among the first to call for "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax."

The Obama tax plan is pure Robin Hood class warfare: Use the tax power of the state to rob the successful and reward the faithful.

But how do Republicans who call Obama a socialist explain their support for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and the Earned Income Tax Credit? What are these if not government-mandated transfers of wealth to the middle and working class, and the indigent and working poor?

There is a difference not just of degree but of kind between unemployment compensation for jobless workers, welfare for destitute families, and confiscating the income of taxpayers who earned it - to hand out to chronic tax consumers who did not.

Enforced egalitarianism entails the death of excellence. For it seizes the rewards that excellence earns and turns them over to politicians and bureaucrats for distribution to the mediocrities upon whose votes they depend.

Patrick Buchanan's column is distributed by Creators Syndicate.

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