Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, May 06, 2009 2:20:31 PM
I've had my suspicions about this for a while now. Obama made it painfully clear this week when he came out for closing foriegn corporate tax shelters.
Barrack is a smart guy. He must know that we live in a global economy, as Clinton did when he signed onto NAFTA and announced to America that he would sign onto economic growth first, to fund his political agenda.
Obama must know that American corporations use these tax shelters to stay competitive with countries who do not live with our insanely high corporate tax rate. If he gets up and talks about this in terms of raising federal revenue, it can only mean that raising federal revenue is a higher priority to him than economic growth.
The only other logical possibility is that he is among the hordes of economic ignorami on the political left who view corporations as some sort of bottomless money pit that can be mined at will, as if they are constantly veering between profit and obscene profit, and can be milked politically without consequence.
If he is about growth of government first and is paying lip service to recovery in the name of that, what is the middle class to make of all this? There is a clear direction he seems to want to go into, and you won't learn about it in the press.
He wants us to be Europe. He wants the government to be the primary employer. He wants the hand of government all over the private sector. He says not, but his actions bely his words. He contends that he does this because he has no choice. Ask the banks that wanted to give the TARP money back. He had a choice there.
He hasn't faced down the primary contradiction of Socialism: the State must step in and leaven the world of corporatism because Man is inherently evil, but it is then overseen by men in government- who are less evil how?