Ed Morrissey delves a little deeper into Comrade Obama’s economic plan I blogged about yesterday and it paints a picture of someone who wants the government to burrow itself even deeper into every aspect of your life:
Obama proposes to create a government-run savings program that provides matching funds on savings. In other words, Obama wants to collect tax money to redistribute it to savers, in a plan that works much the same as employer 401k plans. Why should the government pay people to save their money, especially outside the 401ks that work better and have much higher caps?
Do you like the IRS? Want to trust them to do your tax returns? Rather than simplify taxes, Obama instead wants to have the IRS prepare your returns for you and send them out for your signature. Since the IRS gets all of your income information already, he wants the IRS to calculate how much you owe, without apparently considering that most Americans itemize for deductions. It doesn’t cut down on preparation time in any case, but merely transfers the cost to the federal government– as well as more power to the IRS.
Let’s also consider the workplace pension plan Obama will create. It will create a system of accounts that can follow a worker who moves from employer to employer, and will also provide for pensions when working for small and midsize companies that do not offer one. We already have this system; it’s called Social Security, and it’s slowly going broke. When George Bush tried to bolster it with private accounts — integrated into SS, not a new parallel system as Obama proposes — Democrats screamed bloody murder.
And what happens when the federal government sets up a competing pension system for American workers? Do you think that employers will continue to offer pensions, or do you suppose they’ll shrug that off and let the government take up the slack instead? We will have created another massive new entitlement system, when we can’t afford the ones we have now.
Now some lefties may say, hey….the proposal to have the IRS do your taxes is optional. No one is forcing you to have that service. That may be true but heres the rub, why should the government even offer the service? If your not itemizing then it really is a simple form. This type of “service” is just one more example of the lefty utopia in which everything begins and ends with the government. In the end we all know what this is. It starts out optional and slowly builds on that culture of dependency that the Socialist so desire.
His proposals are nothing but the tired old Socialism that has failed over and over again across the globe.
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