Obama only Partially Socialist

With tax season coming to close, my thoughts began to turn to how unsocialistic Obama may be. Perhaps a far fetched idea, but hear me out.

If you were filing your taxes in 1800, the process would be extremely simple, you wouldn’t because there were no income taxes until 1913, and even then, you would only pay taxes if you were in the top 1% of wealthy people. Over the years, the government has taken advantage of income tax and taxed everyone to the point that “tax freedom day” was sometime in May, in other words, you spent half the year working for Uncle Sam, and the other half of the year paying off your credit cards from Christmas past.

Over the last few years, there have been more and more tax credits available to the point that many people get their money back. In fact, and average family of four, filing jointly, and making $50,000 would essentially not be paying any income taxes. How you may ask?

Consider this: With the standard deduction and four personal exemptions, only $24,000 would be taxable, which means they would pay $2,769 in federal income taxes. Child tax credits would give you $1,000 per child and the Making Work Pay credit would give you another $800. After these credits, you just made $31 for filing your taxes.

It is estimated that more than half of the households filing for taxes won’t be paying any federal income tax.

Now you’re probably asking yourself how this makes Obama less socialistic.

Under pure capitalism, if you made $50,000, you would take home $50,000. Under the current tax laws, if you make $50,000, you would take home $50,000. A good portion of it changes hands about a dozen times, but in the end, you get your money back.

So instead of saying that Obama is socialist, I would say he is only socialist to the 25% of the people who sit at the top of the money-making totem pole. So he is only about 25% socialist.

Obama = survival of the unfit

In a world in which “survival of the fittest” has been the underlying principle and reason for success, failure, and living, Obama’s plans and policies have made an attempt to defy the age-old principle that has built this world. He’s attempting to revamp the phrase to “survival of the fit, unfit, and those that can’t fit”. Will they work? Absolutely not. Here’s why.

Many people compare Obama to Robin Hood because he is trying to make things better for the poor at the expense of the rich. Obama’s health care plan not only benefits the poor at the expense of the rich, but it also helps the alien, legal as well as illegal. Last time I watched Robin Hood, he didn’t help any Mexicans.

The Mexicans come up here because the potential for quality of life is better, given the better health care system, better farms, and better trailers. Now offer them money to buy a trailer, and free health care, we will soon become overrun with Mexico’s unwanted.

The only option for the proud citizens of the United States would be to head north, where not everyone benefits from less than stellar health care, and taxes would only be about 45%. Too good to be true. This is truly where only the fit survive.

If you are going to attempt to create a socialist environment without screwing everything up, you must first become illegal, like Robin Hood. Perhaps Obama fits that mold since I’m sure his income exceeds the qualifications to live in government housing. You know he’s cheating the system somehow.

If you want the support of your citizens, you’ll have to sacrifice the support of the Mexicans. Just build a giant wall like they have in China. As Colbert once said, you don’t see any Mexicans in China. Send the illegals back home. This will open up jobs on farms and for landscapers that 9.5% of the population would appreciate.

As of right now, the only thing preventing socialism from taking full affect is the rich class. These wealthy, educated people don’t want their money taken away, nor the means by which it was accomplished. The only way around it is to not tax them. This means the middle class is going to be taxed to support the poor. Will this idea prove to be kosher with the middle class? Why not? Most of them hove no idea where their money is going. They just work and pay bills.

The only way socialism would work right now is by letting the rich play their survival of the fittest game, while allowing the poor and middle class to merely survive.

State of the Economy Address

When I watch CNBC in the mornings, one if the most consistent topics for discussion is that of the state of the economy.  While we are currently suffering what is statistically the worst recession since the Great Depression decades ago, our stock market has rallied to the point that many analysts are declaring that this crisis is over.  While only time could tell, I find it hard to believe that a problem that took us many years to get into would take months to recover.  

What I don’t understand is the steps that were taken in order to dig us out of this recession.  Some of you may remember the stimulus payments that were handed out to taxpayers back in May-July of 2008.  Our country spent several billion dollars that basically did nothing.  So what did we decide to do?  Lets spend even more money.  Another stimulus package was passed and we almost instantaneously added another $1,000,000,000,000 to our national debt.  But I guess it was fine since that $1 trillion represented only about 15% of what the national debt was at the time.  

While the ultraoptimists are excited about the direction they think the economy is headed, the biggest question that comes to my mind is funding for this massive stimulus package.  There are really only two ways to finance this insane amount of money - taxes and the federal reserve.  

The Federal Reserve could simply pump tons of money into the system, but that would only cause high inflation at best.  

So the only other option would be to impose more taxes.  I’m fine with it since America has the simplest taxing system in the world, and corporate taxes are at all-time lows.  

I work at a one of the most prestigious grocery stores in the country.  Since I don’t really do any work, I have the opportunity to talk politics with the other employees that don’t do any work either.  That’s what makes Broulim’s such a prestigious place.  Obama supporter #1, we’ll call him “Seth”, is all about progressive income taxes, meaning the more money you make, the higher percentage of your money goes to Uncle Sam.  Further conversating revealed his ignorance to U.S. History.  He didn’t realize that income taxes were discovered in 1913.  Ironically, that was about the same time America got into debt.  

Socialist #1 and Socialist #2, we’ll call them “Rick” and “Christian”, were another interesting conversation piece.  They are firm believers that instead of taxing everyone, only the rich should be taxed.  That is fairly similar to the initial purpose of income taxes in 1913 as it was intended to tax only the ultra rich.  The difference?  Under their plan, income for the wealthy would be capped at about $2.5 million.  That’s a great idea since I’m sure that will motivate people to become industrious and innovative.  

California has some of the highest taxes in the country.  According to another one of my co-workers, California Boy #1 "Craig", instead of handing out tax returns, California resorted to handing out IOU’s.  His wife is from Modesto, California by the way.

So let’s tax the $#@% out of people so that our government can get out of debt.  

This graph only goes up to 2004, before our massive spending spree over the last year, but I think it is fairly obvious that the strides we have made to tax ourselves in order to get out of debt has paid off.  Our debt since 1970 has really only grown linearly as opposed to exponentially.  That’s good news.  

My good friend Stephen Colbert brought up the idealogy of our brilliant leaders in getting out of the Great Depression.  Just spend.  That didn’t work so they kept spending.  It didn’t work until they joined a little fight called World War II, when we got out of the depression through more spending. (look at the graph)

So if we follow that same historical theory, we’ll just keep spending until we piss off the rest of the world and then we’ll get in a little scuffle with our neighbors, spend more money and we are on our way to another economic boom.  Brilliance at it’s finest.  

So until we go to war, we just have to impose more taxes.  That’s fine because that means our accountants won’t lose their jobs and become just another unemployment statistic. 

Throughout this mess, I have maintained with my co-workers that the way to get out of this crisis is to decrease taxes.  Less taxes means more money for the consumer to spend.  Consumer spending is a lot more effective than government spending.  

Corporations have resorted to outsourcing in order to cut costs.  Over the last couple of weeks I have learned from Obama that these costs are cut through loopholes.  

If we cut corporate taxes, corporations will come back to our shores.  This will provide more jobs, create more consumer spending and so forth.  

So Obama’s solution to convincing corporations to come back is absolutely jeneus, let’s tax them even more.  Let’s show them that their loopholes can be straightened out.  If we can show corporations that they are going to be taxed just as much overseas as they would be here, maybe they’ll spend the extra money to come back to America from India.  That will cause India’s unemployment to skyrocket, and perhaps that will be the catalyst that causes World War III.  A war would mean more spending, and booyah, we are out of this recession.  I don’t know about you but I’m convinced that this could really work.  

Disclaimer:  despite my disagreements with these policies, I understand that these policies are a result of Obama’s economic advisors instead of his own brilliance.  I’m not an expert in the field of economics, simply a bacheloreate in economics.  Therefore, these are opinions based upon my ignorance of the subject.

Next weeks post: How steroids saved baseball

Feel free to suggest future topics.