Obama Declares Class Warfare

Yesterday I discussed how the Obamists plan to extort big bucks from business. Today we'll discuss how they plan to pick the pockets of the ordinary taxpayer. You see, "taxpayer" applies to people who actually pay taxes. The Obamists apply "taxpayer" when they actually mean "tax-filer." About forty percent file their tax forms solely to see how much money they'll be getting from the fools who actually hand their money over to Uncle Sugar for redistribution to the filers.

Barack Obama is done playing nice-nice with the "rich." Now that he's back in campaign mode (did he ever leave it?), it's time to reopen the class war. For public consumption, Obama sees three classes: The rich, the poor and the nebulous middle class. In reality, he sees only two: The prodigal son and the fatted calf. The prodigal son has done everything wrong, and has done nothing to deserve forgiveness. Nevertheless, it's time for him to feed on the fatted calf. In the Bible, the prodigal son only gets away with this once. In the Democratic book, he gets to do this annually.

Like income "taxpayers" for income "tax-filers," Obama conflates "earners" with "wage-earners," meaning that anyone who "makes" more than $200,000 is a wage-earner. Since he has never owned or run a business, he has no clue that $200,000 in wages paid by somebody else is not half-bad, but $200,000 for a small business owner is often a break-even figure. While he rakes in mega-millions for his political campaigning from the very corporations he claims to despise (such as GE, a tax-filer), he actually goes after bakery-owner John Smith, taxpayer.

Those $200,000+ business-owners are the backbone of American business, as well as the largest source of tax revenue for the federal income redistribution machine. These "rich" people comprise about 10% of the tax-filers, but account for about 75% of taxes actually paid. These are the people who build the economy and provide employment for Americans who don't work for the federal government. So what class warrior Obama is really talking about is the job-producing taxpayers being required to support the freeloading tax-filers. This doesn't even include the tax-eaters who don't file at all because they are on some form of federal or state welfare.

How does this redistribution work? About 59% of American households get at least one federal handout (not including "paid-for" Social Security and Medicare). Often it is nothing more than a tax "refund," but that's just the surface. It is estimated that about $2.2 trillion will be collected from American households for fiscal 2010, but at the same time, $2.3 trillion will be paid out to the tax-filing households. As Columbia and Harvard-educated Obama says: "Ah'm not gunna hand out big tax breaks to the rich while paying the bills with money from the little guy." Oh? The "little guy" he refers to probably hasn't paid more in federal taxes than he received in federal largess in twenty years.

What makes this so dangerous is that the "eat the rich" philosophy of class warfare is becoming easier to swallow each year because of the growing number of voters who pay no net income taxes but do collect federal benefits. For 2010-2011 that might be as much as 45% of the population. The game is over if that ever reaches 50% + 1, at which point the majority non-payers can simply choose whatever amount they want for themselves at the expense of the minority taxpayers. Demagogues like Caesar and Obama know these things. And so did the Founders. They warned us of the danger of what would happen when the majority discovered it could vote itself largess from the federal treasury.

The faux Man of the People who currently sits in the White House fully understands how many votes he can pick up as opposed to how many he will lose by relaunching class warfare. But he also understands how careful he must be not to bring up the byzantine tax code that imposes more benefits than burdens on both the poor and the genuinely-rich big corporations. In other words, he is out to destroy the middle class by classifying them as "rich," so that he can add the demagogic phrase "they can afford it." A guy named Marx (not Groucho) had the same idea. Destroy the middle class. Or for the limousine liberals, the "bourgeoisie."

Obama didn't even ask Congress for a declaration of class war. He didn't need to. At least until the "shellacking" in November of 2010, Congress was right there with him.