Economic Patriotism

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Posted: 8:11 a.m. Friday, Sept. 28, 2012

Economic Patriotism

President Obama gives a speech in Ohio on the economy

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By Neal Boortz

Two little peaks into the mind of Barack Obama and how he views wealth. Are you ready? These are comments that most Americans probably wouldn’t think twice about, especially as class warfare rhetoric becomes more the norm with every day that passes.

The first is at a recent campaign stop. Obama told a crowd of ObamaBots, “The country doesn’t succeed when only the rich get richer. We succeed when the middle class gets bigger.” Wrong. We succeed when more people in the middle class become rich! It’s called income mobility … and until Obama came along the statics showed that the reason the middle class was growing smaller was because the middle class was moving on up! Our Dear Ruler doesn’t comprehend this because he is predisposed to despise the rich, and can’t believe that those people who are, to him, the focus of all that is evil were once middle class --- or poor. He believes that rich people became rich by taking away money from someone else. This is why his goal has never been to grow the size of our economic pie but merely to redistribute the current pie. And at the rate we are going, the pie (especially for those in the middle class) is shrinking. Median household income isdown by $4,520 since Obama took office. This isn’t because evil rich people are stealing their portion of the pie … it’s because there is not enough confidence and capital for people to create businesses and hire workers, produce products and services and earn wealth.

Now I said I had two recent peaks into the mind of Dear Ruler. That was one of them. Another one occurs in a new Obama campaign ad. Here’s a rough transcript of part of that ad …


“Fourth, a balanced plan to reduce our deficit by four trillion dollars over the next decade on top of the trillion in spending we've already cut, I'd ask the wealthy to pay a little more. And as we end the war in Afghanistan let's apply half the savings to pay down our debt and use the rest for some nation building right here at home.

It's time for a new economic patriotism. Rooted in the belief that growing our economy begins with a strong, thriving middle class …”

We’ll get to this “economic patriotism” in a minute, but first …

Are people still buying this idea that if taxes increase on wealthy Americans, that we could even come close to reducing our deficit? I would love for one of these camera crews to interview Obama supporters and ask them the following question: If you could impose a 100% tax on all the earnings of every rich person in America earning at least $250,000 a year, how much money would you get? The answer is $1.4 trillion. I doubt that any of these ObamaBots would recognize that this is about the same as the deficit Obama has run every year since he’s been in office. So we’re talking over $4 trillion in deficits under Barack Obama. So taking all of the earnings of these evil rich people would not even make a dent in the increases in spending that Obama is responsible for, much less any reduction.

So then the ObamaBot says, “Well what about those evil corporations?” Glad you asked. Walter Williams has done the math on this question as well. Taking all of the evil profits of the Fortune 500 companies would be about $400 billion. That’s nothing to sneeze at. But if you compare it to how much our federal government spends, its peanuts. Seizing all of the profits from Fortune 500 companies would be enough to run our government for a whopping 40 days. We can’t even start to talk about reducing the deficit when it can’t even fund our government for a little over a month.

So the ObamaBot starts to get really irritated. Maybe they are astute enough to recognize that your first question had to do with how much these rich people are earning. So they ask about the wealth of these rich people – their evil yachts and private planes and mansions and jewels. The imperial federal government could confiscate all of that for a one-time gain of about $1.3 trillion. Again, in context of how much our government spends, that won’t do a lot to mitigate our current expenses, much less reduce the deficit.

The fact is this … you could take all of the earnings of every evil rich people earning over $250,000 a year, all of the profits of the greedy corporations and all of the wealth acquired by America’s filthy billionaires, and that would only be enough money to fund our current federal government for eight months. That’s it! We can’t even fund an entire year of spending, much less reduce our deficit by any significant margin.

Obama wants these rich people to pay a little bit more, and yet the share of the income tax burden paid by the top 1% of taxpayers has almost doubled since the 1970s. Considering that to be the case, the problem doesn’t seem to be taxes, it seems to be spending.

Oh and about this “economic patriotism” nonsense. Why is it that Barack Obama believes it is patriotic to plunder the pockets of productive Americans? Is that what he truly values as patriotic?