Obama is a tax-cutting, budget-slashing socialist

By Nicholas Wilbur

President Obama is an unabashed socialist, and the Democratic Party is an unashamed guerrilla band of anti-business, tax-and-spend liberals bent on destroying the American Dream by punishing hard-working entrepreneurs and small business owners in order to pay for social services benefitting the weak, the lazy, and the government-teat-suckling post-hippie stoner generation of anti-capitalistic communists, flag burners, and lifetime welfare recipients.

Right?

Isn't that what the right is always accusing? Is that not the sole purpose for Rupert Murdoch's creation of the Fox News Network – to tell these truths to the American people and open their eyes to the devastation socialism is bringing to the United States?

Let us assume for a moment that everything that comes out of the mouths of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and Megyn Kelly is irrefutable fact.

Why is it, then, that Democrats have, as of this writing, agreed to cut more than $50 billion from Obama's 2011 fiscal year budget proposal?

If Republicans are stereotyped as fearmongering war profiteers, corporate lackeys, and radical Bible thumpers, it's fair to say Democrats are most often stereotyped as anti-business, tax-and-spend defenders of big government.

And yet, it was the Democrats in Congress who voted for a bill in December, signed into law by Obama, to extend tax cuts for all Americans, even the richest income earners. And now they're negotiating with Republicans to reduce government spending in order to quell the conservative base, whom Republicans promised during the 2010 midterm campaign to cut spending by exactly $100 billion.

Are we to believe Democrats are so afraid of a government shutdown they're willing to abandon the core tenets of their ideology, even though the history of 1995 tells us that a shutdown spurred by uncompromising fiscal hawks will pay huge election dividends to the party defending against such massive cuts to social programs? Do they actually believe – as, apparently, a strong bloc of conservative voters did in 2010 – that the deficit is so disgustingly high that Chinese debt collectors will foreclose our homes, repo our cars, and sell the bone marrow they sucked from our children's spines if we don't get our fiscal house in order?

Does any American, particularly the most patriotic among us (those within the Tea Party, of course), actually believe that the deficit monsters will go back into hibernation if Democrats accept the nice, round $100 billion in budget cuts proposed by House Republicans? Will that gargantuan 3.7 percent reduction in the deficit keep us safe from the financial collapse Republicans warned us about in 2010?

Of course, these are all rhetorical questions. The only reason the deficit is a concern is that Republicans made it a concern as part of a carefully orchestrated campaign strategy designed to scare the masses out of their recliners and into the voting booths. Congratulations, GOP. It worked.

When the Federal Reserve announced in February of this year that it had increased its economic growth predictions to as much as 3.9 percent for 2011, the problem of the national deficit suddenly looked less apocalyptic than it had in November, when projections for 2011 growth were a respectable but unflattering 2.7 percent.

Higher economic growth means more government revenue, which means a lower deficit. At 3.9 percent growth, the deficit would fall to $113 billion in 10 years, according to a Time magazine analysis. That doesn't include the hundreds of billions the nation will save at the end of 2012, when tax cuts for the rich are set to expire. (Obama and Democrats have vowed to allow this expiration, although they have supported extending the cuts for Americans making less than $250,000 annually.)

Complete the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq and end the occupation of Afghanistan by 2014, and we're looking at a government surplus by the time Obama leaves the White House... in 2016.

But that's all beside the point. The apocalyptic deficit forecasts during the campaign served one purpose for the Republicans Party, and it wasn't to raise awareness about any real threats to American sovereignty.

The point is that we've allowed the media to portray the Obama Administration's emergency response to the recession as a sign of his socialist governing philosophy even though he agreed to the GOP's demands to spend $800 billion on tax cuts largely benefiting the rich and spending cuts to social programs largely benefiting the working class, the poor, and the elderly.

That said, don't expect the Republican sound machine to take it down a notch on the socialism rhetoric. Fox has a business to run, after all. 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Credits: cartoon, graph.