To tanstaafl:
What you say is true (about the president not being empowered to turn the position into a social welfare agency), however, you missed my point entirely, but I’ll get to that later. For starters, Obama would not be the first president to redistribute wealth. If you pay taxes of any kind, you are already participating in a wealth redistribution program. If you collect a military or government pension, you already participate in a wealth redistribution program. For Christ’s sake, most rich school districts in this country participate in a wealth redistribution program that sends a portion of wealthy districts’ tax money to poorer districts and it’s called (tada) the Robin Hood program! To put it bluntly, wealth redistribution has been going on for a quite while in this country and it is absolutely NECESSARY; some of it good, some of it bad but none of it new. Next, Obama’s so called wealth redistribution is mainly allowing the tax cuts Bush gave the wealthy back in his first term to expire which, essentially, causes the wealthy (above 200,000 a year) to pay the same taxes that they did about six years ago. He is not raising their taxes beyond any level that they haven’t already seen so what’s socialistic about that. Incidentally, the expiration on those tax cuts isn’t even scheduled to happen until 2010 so its not even imminent and may not even be necessary if the economy is improved by then… something Obama has stated before. In any case, Bush allowed a multitude of Clinton tax credits to expire a few years back of which the estate tax and the marriage tax credit were the most prominent. Were you crying about that when he did it? Did you call him a socialist reformer. Not only that, Bush then proceeded to propose and pass a ridiculous government bailout plan that is more socialist than anything this country has ever done and, if executed the way it was initially planned, would fully qualify as a socialist move because the government would have controlling interest of private institutions. Did you cringe at that? Was there an outcry from you? Well there should have been if you are going to knock Obama for basically continuing to use increased taxes to fund projects that, ironically, he never said he was going to give to the poor. He is only allowing the tax cuts on the wealthy to expire to offset the planned tax cuts he wants to give to middle class. The last time I checked, middle class isn’t poor… not even lower middle class. Struggling maybe, but not poor by anyone’s definition. Check you facts before you throw out wild accusations. I am not saying Obama is perfect ( I personally think he is arrogant and pompous), but for better or worse, he is the President of the United STates now and it will help this country (not him) if everybody simply accepted that (as they have so many times before) and worked to make sure the he does what he needs to do get this country out of the recession it is in. If we all can’t unite behind our own president, then this country IS more screweed than I thought it was.
