McCain slams Obama on 'redistribution of wealth'

[link to www.youtube.com]

Here's the radio broadcast.

McCain is a greedy aristocrat. What do you expect him to say?

The wealth needs to redistributed, back to the middle class where it was originally stolen from.

Are republicans really this stupid, that they can't see this?

it appears so

It's unbefuckinlievable!

i'm extremely busy today at work cause i'm 2 people short, but i will take the time out of my busy day to say to you pac,




good bye.

Shame............no one is even listening to this old man anymore.

What wealth?

Oh yes, people are. It is unwise to assume that becuase you aren't listening that other people aren't.

People usually surround themselves with others who have similar beliefs and world views. Don't forget there are A LOT of people who feel just as strongly as you do... in the opposite direction.

Yes, yes they are.

They're more than simply stupid - they're brainwashed cattle for the rich & powerful.

McCain just wants to keep the wealth in the hands of the elite. Leaving the middle class high and dry.

Barry and his minions are being openly exposed for who they are and what they want.

Who's gonna hire you when the "rich" can't afford to run a business anymore?

Unless you already don't have a job...

PAC,
What the fuck do you think Taxes are?

McCain doesn't even know how many houses he owns...spends $150,000 on Palin's wardrobe...and says you have to make more than $5 million a year to be rich..thinks if you make $4 million a year you're middle class.

Aristocrat.

The rich will still be able to run businesses. Hence being "rich". You're not very good at this.

"Summary
Republicans are misrepresenting Obama's tax proposals right down to the bitter end. New radio ads from the McCain campaign and a TV spot from the pro-Republican group Let Freedom Ring are targeting voters nationwide with some of the same tax deceptions we've been hearing all fall, rolled in a bundle and flung through the airwaves. One of the radio ads features Hank Williams Jr., the other Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. But new packaging doesn't make the charges any less false.

* Taxes wouldn't have gone up on "families" making as little as $42,000 under the budget resolution passed last spring, as the Charlie Crist ad says. Try $90,000 for a typical family of four. And anyway, that measure doesn't at all resemble what Obama's actually proposing to do.

* The Let Freedom Ring ad claimed that Obama has "voted to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire," meaning "our income taxes will actually go up." But Obama only voted to let some of the tax cuts expire, and at any rate nobody's taxes are going up as a result of that vote. The group yanked this ad off the air rather than try to defend it.

* Echoing a recent McCain theme, Crist says, "McCain knows that people don't want to 'spread the wealth,' " condemning Obama's use of the phrase when he talked to "Joe the Plumber." Actually, McCain has supported taxing high earners more than low earners. Not so long ago McCain said, "Wealthy people can afford [to pay] more." Obama's tax plan would "spread the wealth" more than McCain's, but it's not as though McCain wants to do away with the progressive tax system we currently have.

Analysis
The McCain-Palin campaign and Republican National Committee are running the Charlie Crist radio ad in Florida, while the Hank Williams Jr. version is running in Virginia, Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio and several other states, according to Politico. Let Freedom Ring was airing its TV ad in battleground states as part of a million-dollar ad buy, but pulled the spot from the airwaves because the group felt it couldn't stand behind the ad's assertions. Nevertheless, the ad was still prominently displayed on the group's Web site, neverfindout.org, as of Oct. 25.

"Folks"-y Deception


The radio ads present us with a slight variation on an old theme, telling us that to pay for new programs, "congressional liberals" want to raise taxes on "folks" making $42,000 a year, in the case of the Williams ad, and "American families" making that amount, in the case of the Crist ad.

The claims refer to the budget resolution that Obama and others voted for earlier this year, which we've written about over and over. First off, a budget resolution is a kind of rough budgetary blueprint that Congress passes each year. Its specific provisions can't take effect without further legislation, and lawmakers have taken no action to implement this one, which in theory would have allowed Bush's tax cuts to expire for people in the 25 percent tax bracket, allowing their tax rate to revert to 28 percent.


Even if it had been enacted, though, there would have been no tax hike for "families" (as one ad says) making $42,000 a year. (The other ad says "folks," a somewhat less precise phraseology). No, nyet, non, nein. We have nightmares about our very own version of the film "Groundhog Day," in which we wake to Sonny and Cher's "I Got You, Babe," then stagger to our laptop and type these sentences: While it's true that a single taxpayer making $42,000 a year would have seen his or her taxes go up by about $15 if this provision had been followed up and enacted, a family of four would have had to hit an income level of $90,000 before experiencing a tax hike. For couples, the figure would have been $83,000.

And, once again, Obama himself proposes tax cuts for 95 percent of families with children. Only families with more than $250,000 annual income would see an increase.

We could say that we didn't think the McCain campaign had heard a word we've said over these long months, but we know it has: It cites our work in its back-up for the Crist ad. The article it quotes from though – "The $32,000 Question" – doesn't support what the radio ad says. What we said is this: "The resolution Obama voted for would not have increased taxes on any single taxpayer making less than $41,500 per year in total income, or any couple making less than $83,000."

Maybe the campaign is only half-listening.

VERDICT: 100% Wrong

The Let Freedom Ring TV ad is even worse. It claimed that "100% of America" would see taxes go up because Obama "voted to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire." This is so far from reality that we had to ask Let Freedom Ring what vote it could possibly be referring to. And a spokesman said it was Obama's vote on the same budget resolution just mentioned. But as we noted above, the resolution only would have let some of those tax cuts expire. It would have preserved provisions that benefit families – "marriage penalty" relief, child tax credits, a 10 percent tax bracket for the lowest-earning taxpayers. It did not call for letting the cuts expire for "100 percent of America." So the claim in this ad is 100 percent wrong. And Let Freedom Ring appears to know that. "We weren't comfortable" with the ad's assertion, the spokesman told us, and the group has taken it off the air. It still appears on the Web site for the group's ad campaign, however.

Looking forward, Obama's actual tax plan would indeed allow Bush tax cuts to expire, but only for the top two income tax brackets. Those would revert to pre-Bush levels, and the brackets would be adjusted if necessary to ensure that they include only individuals making more than $200,000 per year, or couples making more than $250,000. (Two percent of the population will make more than $250,000 next year).

Obama proposes a number of tax cuts for lower- and moderate-income people. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, by 2012 middle-income people (those in the middle one-fifth of all households) would get to keep an extra $2,200 per year in after-tax income on average under Obama than they do now. Under McCain, that figure would be $1,400. The top 1 percent of earners, on the other hand, would have to pay an average of $19,000 more in taxes under Obama, while under McCain they'd see their taxes cut by an average of $125,000.



Plumbing the Meaning

The Crist ad refers to the phrase "spread the wealth," which was used by Obama in his now-familiar conversation with Joe Wurzelbacher in Toledo.

What Obama was saying is that giving tax breaks that have disproportionately benefited upper-income taxpayers leaves those further down the scale "pinched," with the result that "business is bad for everybody."

Obama, Oct. 12: [W]e've cut taxes a lot for folks like me who make a lot more than $250,000. We haven't given a break to folks who make less. It's not that I want to punish your success, I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance at success, too. And everybody is so pinched that business is bad for everybody. And I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.

Obama was wrong about one thing; the Bush tax cuts did in fact give tax breaks "to folks who make less," including the previously mentioned 10 percent tax bracket, "marriage penalty" relief and an increase in the per-child tax credit, all of which Obama proposes to keep. What his plan would do is provide even more tax benefits at the middle and low end of the scale, while increasing taxes at the top.

This way of "spread[ing] the wealth around" is hardly a new concept. The United States already has a progressive tax system by which high earners are taxed at higher rates than those who make less. Obama would make it somewhat more progressive. (The Williams ad uses the term "taxing the rich.")

McCain himself hasn't always seemed so opposed to progressive taxation. Here's what he said in a 2000 meeting with college students sponsored by the MSNBC program "Hardball," when questioned about the issue:

McCain, Oct. 12, 2000: [W]e feel, obviously, that wealthy people can afford more.
....
And I think middle-income Americans, working Americans ... all of the taxes that working Americans pay, I think they – you would think that they also deserve significant relief, in my view.
...
[H]ere's what I really believe, that when you are – reach a certain level of comfort, there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.


In fact, the system would remain progressive under McCain's tax plan. His argument with Obama isn't about whether to "spread the wealth," but by how much.

Also, as we now know, Joe the Plumber would almost certainly be entitled to a tax cut if Obama's plan were implemented – and a larger one than he'd get under McCain's.

Say It Ain't So!
The Hank Williams ad says that "congressional liberals want to increase spending by nearly a trillion dollars." (The other ad uses almost identical wording.) In this case, "congressional liberals" seem to be standing in for Obama, judging from the back-up material sent to us by the McCain team. And this is an old claim, based on the McCain campaign's estimate that the cost of Obama's various proposals would be $860 billion (the ad rounds the figure up rather, um, liberally).

It's certainly true that Obama proposes large new spending programs, while McCain proposes large but unspecified spending cuts. But the trillion-dollar estimate (which would be spread over four years) doesn't factor in any of Obama's proposed savings or cuts. For example, he proposes to eliminate $15 billion per year in subsidies given to health insurance companies for Medicare Advantage programs, which are insurance plans offered by private companies as an alternative to traditional government-sponsored Medicare.

Outside analysts like the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have found that neither Obama nor McCain would come close to balancing the federal budget without additional spending cuts or tax increases that they have yet to specify."

–by Viveca Novak and Jess Henig
[link to www.factcheck.org]
Sources

[link to firstread.msnbc.msn.com]
[link to www.politico.com]
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the thought of money trickling down is a stupid bush policy.


money trickles from the ground up, always remember that

User 78-68,

Did you even listen to the radio interview in Chicago from 2001 that is linked above? I am well aware of tremendous inequalities in our system, and aware of corruption all throughout the political spectrum on both sides of the aisle, however, Communism doesn't work, and stealing by force from small business owners, entrepreneurs, and hard working families is just wrong.

Welfare and tons of loathsome taxes are on the horizon with this radical Communist idealogue Obama, especially with both houses of Congress loaded with leftists. McCain/Palin was a massive "mistake" intended to stack the deck for commrade Obama and the new USSA(United Socialist States of Amerika)!

There's more than one way to redistribute wealth. If redirecting some of the pay and bennies of overpaid CEOs back down to the employees is "redistribution of wealth"... I'm okay with it.

The effort to spin the notion of wealth redistribution as socialism is yet another act of desperation.

Un-sticky this, Trinity. Please..

Yea, you are correct. I forgot about all the bible thumper, mega church, brainwashed fools that are now for McCain because of Palin and her belief that dinosaurs and man walked together on Earth..........6,000 years ago.

And the full of energy, over 65 group that are die-hard to McCain cause.........he's one of them.

Mix those altogether and what do ya get? About 175 Electoral votes. A landslide loss for the geritol, and waiting for the 2nd coming crowd.

Nah, let him keep this pinned.

It's exposing this site as nothing more than a right wing think tank.

passive aggressive. i like it

Fucking morons, did nobody notice the current administration just gave $700 billion to the rich? If that isn't redistribution of wealth I don't know what is. Giving it back to the poor is called justice.

alms for the rich


both candidates voted for the bailout

McCain sold you folks out in the bailout just like the rest of them. He supported the nationalization of insurance, banking and mortgages. Your arguments about Obama being a socialist just fizzed out. Your own little hero the wooden man wants us to keep bailing out rich guys. He doesn't seem to have any ideas of his own...he's a mouthpiece only. Just repeats fear slogans over and over until he hits the right fear note. And he's not above lieing. Even his own party has pointed this out.
MCain is in the pocket of the rich boys and has been for years. Have you looked into his association with Peabody coal? They've been in bed togother for a loooong time now. There's plenty on McCain, you don't want to see

"Right wing" and "thinking" don't exactly mix.

haha we posted at the same time

It's a total joke that these BS threads are always pinned,