I believe McCain proposed doing exactly that during one of the presidential debates.
I think he’s talking about the rather surprising plan that McCain announced at one of the debates to, er buy up troubled mortgages at face value. That would be in addition to the bailout bill. But McCain is not a marxist, so he is allowed to say stuff like that without everyone having a panty twistathon.
Edit, as said above.
This is classic Aynal retentive Rand Rover! Definitely! First you demand a cite for a stated position, and then baldly offer utterly unsubstantiated rot without even the hint of a cite.
Balderdash, sir! Tommyrot!
When Obama came out in favor of them. Duh!
Who said it was part of the bailout bill? It’s McCain’s own proposal, not part of the bill.
Suck on that.
Welfare? Are you fucking serious? What year do you think this is? Do you think it’s 1980? Do you think this is Reagan Vs. Carter? Are you concerned about the Cold War too?
Cite for Obama wanting to “increase welfare?”
Note that to wingnuts, “increase welfare” = “ZOMG! I’ll be paying more taxes than poor people out of my 10-to-100-times-the-size-of-theirs income!”
Cry more, rich people. Your bitter tears of salty greed are delicious.
Dude, whadya mean? He’s a ni…one of THEM. OF COURSE he wants to increase welfare!
But none of the welfare that supports Real Americans. Just the part that goes to, er, THEM.
I think I need this for a sig line. May I steal it?
Oops on the mortgages at face value thing, I forgot about that (willful blindess probably–I agree that it’s stupid). I apologize Liberal.
The other point remains though. Obama’s stated plans would inrease spending more than would McCain’s stated plans. I don’t think there is any controversy on this point. The controversy comes in trying to guage how much Obama would cause the government to spend in addition to his stated plans. You may mock people who call Obama a Marxist, and I’m not saying he is one, but he’s definitely bent more toward big government than is McCain.
As I’ve said before, I realize many of McCain’s policies would increase spending, but he is the lesser of two evils for a voter that favors small government.
Unless you work for the government or a non-profit, you wouldn’t have a job without someone’s greed. You also wouldn’t have many of the other things you like unless the person who created them wanted to make as much money as possible.
Apology accepted.
But there is.
If you look at Obama’s website, you’ll find the details of his plans including how they’re paid for. His economic philosophy is Chicagoan (the economic school, not the city), a philosophy that favors limited government interference in the economy and limited government spending. The only reason he is not an Austrian (the economic school, not the country) is that he believes government can move money, and moving money is exactly what a recessionary economy needs.
The spending increases that he favors are for infrasctructure improvements and energy technology, which will entail hiring people to do work. That was what he actually meant by spreading the wealth — not redistributing it in Keynesian terms. He meant that money needs to move around because when that doesn’t happen, you can’t make money — i.e., create new wealth.
New wealth can be created only if money is moving from one place to another.
You have it exactly backwards.
Keep scrollin’
Liberal, I’d be interested in reading more if you care to post more or link to someone talking about this.
Some questions raised by your post: can you point to anýthing where Obama actually says this (i.e., not just him stating his policies, but stating that chicago-school style redistribution is his goal)? Would he reverse the redistribution once the economy is no longer recessionary (granting for the time being that it is recessionary now)? If not, why not? How does UHC play into all this? When you said that his increased spending is for infrastructure improvement and energyan what about the increase in the EITC and the new tax credits, all of which will send cash to low-income Americans?
I see you’ve met RandRover then.
Well, unless you are a product of in vitro fertilization or the offspring of some creature that reproduces asexually, you wouldn’t exist without someone’s lust, but we still lock people up for committing rape.
It’s just a small one.
Well, there’s an awful lot to say, and the research I did before deciding on Obama took weeks to complete. Once again, I know it’s a prodigious read, but almost all the information one needs is available on Obama’s own website. All his proposed policies are laid out, and sources and citations are provided where needed.
With respect to the earned income tax credit, there are no new tax credits in the offing. His work in that regard is already finished. In the 109th Congress, he sponsored and helped pass legislation that expanded the EITC to include combat pay for military families when they calculate their taxes, which had theretofore been exempt. The same bill reduced the marriage penalty, which effectively wiped out the credit, sometimes forcing people to divorce so they could stay together and provide for their families. He does want to expand the base of qualification for the credit, but that’s only because the official definition of poverty has changed within government while agencies serving the poor have been slow to catch up.
With respect to universal health care, there are numerous aspects to his plan that work together to formulate a practical and fair solution not only for increasing coverage, but for reducing costs. Drug companies, hospitals, insurance companies, and government agencies are so interwoven that one cannot do something about a single aspect without affecting all the other parts. And so the plan is a comprehensive set of incentives designed to promote early preventative care (which is cheaper than disease care), easier access to drugs approved by agencies in first-world countries, a crackdown on insurance fraud and abuse, and tax credits for small businesses that cannot afford to provide health insurance. In addition, he places more accountability on parents for the care of their children. His core philosophy is that people shouldn’t bring into the world children for which they cannot properly care, and thus will require families to cover their children if nothing else. Meanwhile, if you want to change nothing about your coverage, that’s fine, except that your premiums will be lower (due to the steps outlined above and covered in detail on the site). But if you have no coverage, then you will be offered the same coverage that members of Congress, supposedly servants of the people, enjoy.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, it was when I learned that his first chief enonomic advisor was Austan Goolsbee that my curiosity piqued. Goolsbee, of course, is the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and is an up and coming star of free-market economics. I was frankly astounded by this, assuming as most people did that Obama was a typical democrat. I’ve often complained around here of the misrepresentation of a free-market as a free-for-all-market, where capitalist thugs partner with government fatcats to impose themselves on the economy. A free-market is not chaos; it is a well regulated economic system in which force and deception are suppressed — noncoercion, the very core of libertarian economic and social philosophy.
I think Obama put it well:
The American experiment has worked in large part because we guided the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle. A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That’s why we’ve put in place rules of the road: to make competition fair and open, and honest. We’ve done this not to stifle but rather to advance prosperity and liberty. As I said at Nasdaq last September, the core of our economic success is the fundamental truth that each American does better when all Americans do better
[snip]
Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we’ve failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practice. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady, sustainable growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both. Nor is this trend new.
[snip]
I do not believe the government should stand in the way of innovation or turn back the clock on an older era of regulation. But I do believe that government has a role to play in advancing our common prosperity, by providing stable macroeconomic and financial conditions for sustained growth, by demanding transparency and by ensuring fair competition in the marketplace. Our history should give us confidence that we don’t have to choose between an oppressive government-run economy and a chaotic, unforgiving capitalism. It tells us we can emerge from great economic upheavals stronger, not weaker. But we can only do so if we restore confidence in our markets, only if we rebuild trust between investors and lenders, and only if we renew that common interest between Wall Street and Main street that is the key to our long-term success.As a longtime libertarian and champion of the free-market, I say, “Amen!”
Incidentally, I would point out that the earned income tax credit was the brainchild of — wait for it — Ronald Reagan. 
Russell Long, I think, Lib, back in the early '70s. (I have read, and repeated on these boards, the date 1969 as the introduction of the EITC to the tax code, but looking at it more closely, the EITC as such seems to have been planned in 1972 and become law in 1975.)
It was orginally enacted by Ford, but then it was reenacted and greatly expanded by Reagan who was a big fan of it and called it "“the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”
Let’s keep some perspective here. Obama’s plan is to raise taxes by 4% on those making more thn $250K a year and cut taxes on everyone else. This is the plan that John McCain, Fox News and the right wing radio screamers are calling “Marxism.” It’s absurd.