The other day Jim Carrey said that America ought to embrace socialism.
‘Dumb and Dumber’ actor Jim Carrey on Friday urged Democrats to “say yes to socialism” and embrace the attacks from Republicans.
“We have to say yes to socialism — to the word and everything,” Carrey said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” show. “We have to stop apologizing.”
We actually have experimented with socialism. It was called the obama administration.
Obama came into office long aspiring to redistribute income.
First: “We still suffer from not having a Constitution that guarantees its citizens economic rights.” By positive economic rights, Obama means government protection against individual economic failures, such as low incomes, unemployment, poverty, lack of health care, and the like. Obama characterizes the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties,” which “says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.” (Ask not what you can do for your country but what your country can do for you, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy).
Second, Obama regrets that the Constitution places “essential constraints” on the government’s ability to provide positive economic rights and that “we have not broken free” of these Constitutional impediments. Obama views the absence of positive economic liberties that the government must supply as a flaw in the Constitution that must be corrected as part of a liberal political agenda.
Third, Obama concludes that we cannot use the courts to break free of the limited-government constraints of the Founders. The courts are too tradition and precedent bound “to bring about significant redistributional change.” Even the liberal Warren Court “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.” Obama opines that the civil-rights movement’s court successes cannot be duplicated with respect to income redistribution: The “mistake of the civil rights movement was (that it) became so court focused” and “lost track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground…In some ways we still suffer from that (mistake).”
Fourth, Obama argues that economic rights that the state must supply are ultimately to be established at the ballot box. Those who favor redistribution must gain legislative control through an “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.” The electoral task of a redistributive President is therefore to craft coalitions of those who stand to benefit from government largess. The legislature, not the courts, must do this “reparative economic work.”
In sum, Obama views the Constitution as a flawed document from which we must “break free.” We need, instead, a “living” Constitution that refocuses from “negative rights” to requiring income redistribution from the Haves to provide “positive economic rights” to the Have Nots.
Then America went ahead and elected him.
“Obamacare” was a big step in the direction of income redistribution:
While many Americans are upset by ObamaCare’s $1 trillion price tag, Congress is contemplating other changes with little analysis or debate. These changes would create a massively unfair form of income redistribution and create incentives for many not to buy health insurance at all.
Let’s start with basics: Insurance protects against the risk of something bad happening. When your house is on fire you no longer need protection against risk. You need a fireman and cash to rebuild your home. But suppose the government requires insurers to sell you fire “insurance” while your house is on fire and says you can pay the same premium as people whose houses are not on fire. The result would be that few homeowners would buy insurance until their houses were on fire.
The same could happen under health insurance reform. Here’s how: President Obama proposes to require insurers to sell policies to everyone no matter what their health status. By itself this requirement, called “guaranteed issue,” would just mean that insurers would charge predictably sick people the extremely high insurance premiums that reflect their future expected costs. But if Congress adds another requirement, called “community rating,” insurers’ ability to charge higher premiums for higher risks will be sharply limited.
Obama has spread the wealth, but the poor and middle class haven’t benefited.
One reading of the midterm election wave is that voters have concluded that President Obama’s answer to falling incomes and slow growth—higher taxes on the rich and more redistribution—is tapped out. These policies have been up and running for six long years but the middle class is no better off as a result.
On taxes, Mr. Obama often claims that the rich don’t pay their “fair share,” yet the most affluent one-fifth of taxpayers on average supplied 68.7% of federal revenue for 2011. That’s according to the Congressional Budget Office, which last week updated its statistics on the U.S. distribution of income and taxes for 2011 and preliminary calculations for last year.
As for the top 1%, they funded 24% of everything the government does in 2011. The CBO also estimates that the end-of-2012 fiscal cliff deal that lifted the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6%, plus ObamaCare’s taxes on high-income individuals, increased their average federal taxes by 4.3 percentage points to 33.3% of income. The Warren Buffett minimum-tax rule asserted that no millionaire should pay an effective tax below 30%. Mission accomplished.
This has long been the reality of the highly progressive U.S. tax system, but the bigger news in the CBO numbers is that wealth is being spread with little to show for it. According to the CBO, the lowest 60% of earners all collect more in benefits on average than they remit to the Treasury. Yet even the supposed beneficiaries of Mr. Obama’s policies ended up with less in 2011 than 2007.
Obama raised taxes bigly. Here’s a list.
And regulatons? Whoa. obama added 20,642 of them.
The tide of red tape that threatens to drown U.S. consumers and businesses surged yet again in 2015, according to a Heritage Foundation study we released on Monday.
More than $22 billion per year in new regulatory costs were imposed on Americans last year, pushing the total burden for the Obama years to exceed $100 billion annually.
That’s a dollar for every star in the galaxy, or one for every second in 32 years.
All to make things fair. obama cemented his power via income redistribution:
Mr. Obama’s IRS is ready to send out “earned-income tax credit” checks to Americans-in-waiting (once known as illegal aliens) of $35,000 per family, once his Department of Homeland Security declares them legal and gives them work permits. His Consumer Financial Protection Board requires more loans to people with lousy credit, just like the bad mortgages that crashed our economy once before.
The president’s bureaucrats also control $640 billion given to state and local governments each year, to bribe them into supporting (or at least accepting) the Washington agenda.
Politically correct edicts are also used to rechannel our values. Mr. Obama’s first head of regulatory policy was Cass Sunstein, the Harvard professor whose book “Nudge” described how to use regulations to subtly influence the public in the directions chosen by politicians.
And the result of obama’s socialism foray? Economic stagnation. The weakest recovery since 1949:
Even seven years after the recession ended, the current stretch of economic gains has yielded less growth than much shorter business cycles.
In terms of average annual growth, the pace of this expansion has been by far the weakest of any since 1949. (And for which we have quarterly data.) The economy has grown at a 2.1% annual rate since the U.S. recovery began in mid-2009, according to gross-domestic-product data the Commerce Department released Friday.
The prior expansion, from 2001 through 2007, was the only other business cycle of the past 11 when the economy didn’t grow at least 3% a year, on average.
Total growth this expansion ranks just 8th of the past 11 cycles. The U.S. economy, at the end of June, was 15.5% larger than it was when the recession ended in 2009.
The current expansion remains smaller than the one during Richard Nixon‘s administration. And that 16% expansion lasted just three years. The economy grew 18% from 2001 through 2007. It grew 52% from 1961 through 1969.
Despite the current expansion’s lack of intensity—or perhaps because of it—it is now one of the longest.
There have only been three longer expansions in the past seven decades.
So far, it has occurred entirely during Barack Obama‘s time in the Oval Office, making it the longest expansion under a single president. The growth streak would need to extend just a little more than halfway through the next president’s term to achieve a modern record.
The average economic expansion since 1949 has lasted just more than five years. Only the expansion during the 1990s made it 10 years.
obama’s economy in nine charts
More analysis here, here and here.
This is what socialism looks like. This is what socialism does. It makes everyone equally miserable. Socialism is the assurance you do not fare any better than anyone else. The economy woud not have improved. It would continued to stagnate. obama considered himself a world citizen and concerned himself with”greater” matters than just the US. He was ready to take our national successes and “spread them around.” We would all become slaves to the rest of the world.
The vision seen by obama and the rest of the socialists would have the US eventually become an oligarchal rule.
The losers here will be our once-protean middle class. Unlike the owners of corporations in the past, oligarchs have no interest in their workers become homeowners or moving up the class ladder. Their agenda instead is forever-denser, super-expensive rental housing for their primarily young, and often short-term, employees.
There’s surely a compelling logic for oligarchic socialism. The tech moguls get to remain wealthy beyond the most extreme dreams of avarice, while their allies in progressive circles and the media, which they increasingly own, continue to hector everyone else about giving up their own aspirations. All the middle and upwardly mobile working class gets is the right to pay ever more taxes, while they watch many of their children devolve into serfs, dependent on alms and subsidies for their survival.
The middle class would disappear entirely, with no hope of upward mobility. Unless their wealth was confiscated, the uber-rich would rule over all of us, obama included. When someone says “socialism” it always means you and not them.
Bonus
Did you ever notice that people who promote socialism are frequently extremely wealthy?
Jim Carrey net worth $150 million
George Soros net worth $8 billion
Jeff Bezos, the richest man on Earth $150 billion
Who among them is socializing his money?
and barack obama $40 million.
Remember when obama said “at some point you’ve made enough money”?
When will obama have made enough? What is enough money?
Remember went obama said “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
When will obama spread his wealth around?
Can we begin this socialism experiment by confiscating all wealth of the above because “it’s good for everybody”?
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.