Finally, A Socialist Budget

Finally, A Socialist Budget
By John Ransom
4/12/2011

Last week, The Weekly Standard pointed out a hilarious, yet wholly sad correction in the New York Times' story of March 30th about Obama's new energy policy. Obama, as you know, laid out a “new” energy policy in a speech at Georgetown University.

Turns out, it wasn’t so new.

The Times wrote:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 30, 2011

A previous version of this article misstated how many of the president's proposals to reduce the country's reliance on imported oil were new in his speech on Wednesday. None of them were, not one of them.

I have no idea how many new ideas the Times first credited to Obama, but I'm certainly glad that even the New York Times is starting to understand that Obama is the guy who we said he was.

On the eve of the budget speech that CNN hopes will be a defining moment in the Obama presidency- gosh, let’s hope not- we already know that Obama’s speech will contain nothing new.

“If the rich were taxed at the same rates they were half a century ago,” said Obama senior advisor David Plouffe making the weekend TV circuit, “they’d be paying in over $350 billion more this year alone, which translates into trillions over the next decade. That’s enough to accomplish everything the nation needs while also reducing future deficits.”

Yes: That’s all the administration has.

Blame the rich.

It’s an old, tired game that doesn’t work. We proved that in the late 1960s and 1970s.

So why stop there? Maybe Obama can resurrect ideas that didn’t work in the first half of the 20th century too?

Rep. Jan Shakowsky, (D-IL), the most far left member of Congress, has been walking point for just such a “tax-the-rich” bill as Obama will lay out on Wednesday. She calls it the “Fairness in Taxation Act.”

Schakowsky isn’t just Orwellian, either. She is a real honest to goodness socialist- not the closet variety like Obama. She was offended by the bailout of big-time capitalists and yearned for a simpler time when wealth was just redistributed.

Schakowsy's ties to socialism go back a ways.

Schakowsky gave the keynote speech at a 2004 dinner held by the Democrat Socialists of America (DSA). Prior to that, in 2000 she received the Eugene Debs award from the DSA, honoring the memory of Debs in “her dedication to the fight for a just society.”

For the uninitiated, Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was and remains America’s most famous socialist. He ran for president under the socialist ticket four times between 1904 and 1920, the last run from prison.

Imagine the coincidence: Rep. Schakowsky’s husband also served time in a federal prison. Debs served for resistance to the draft; Schakowsky’s husband, Robert Creamer, served five months in 2006 for tax evasion and bank fraud. So obviously the Schakowsky household is very familiar with the tax code.

Good pick, Obama. Schakowsky’s just another friend from Chicago helping you Transform America.

It’s not surprising that after the GOP got a budget deal done for the balance of 2011 and Budget Chair Republican Paul Ryan introduced an ambitious attempt to reduce the national debt, that Obama would trot out his own version of fiscal “responsibility.”

Like his energy policy, however, his budget will not contain one new idea, not one.

"The least we can do is meet our responsibilities to produce a budget," Obama told a crowd in Pennsylvania last week. Unfortunately the president didn’t even do the least he could do. He hasn’t produced a real budget in three years, not one.

During the Democrat National Convention in Denver in 2008, the Republican National Committee, handed out cards calling Obama "a mile high and an inch deep," during their Not Ready tour.

The RNC might want to correct their original measurement.

Since his inauguration Obama hasn’t looked even an inch deep, not one.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.