Dear friends:

I had just about decided to shut up about the election but then this morning found the below excellent commentary on the "change" to our nation that Obama is planning for us.  It seemed too good to let pass.  Enjoy.

Jim
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Obama promises change, all right -- radical at its best
 
Lynn Forester de Rothschild

Lynn Forester de Rothschild is president and CEO of E.L. Rothschild Limited, a private investment company in New York City. She is a member of numerous boards including The Economist, Estee Lauder and American Fund for the Tate Gallery.

October 30, 2008
 
When Barack Obama announced that he was running for president, he was clear that, if elected, he planned "not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation."

Twenty months after that statement in Springfield, Ill., we have a much clearer view of what he means by "change we can believe in." In a campaign of soaring generalizations on mostly centrist themes, Obama has described the details of the transformation with almost surgical precision. What he offers may be, in substance and in spirit, a radical departure from the principles of the America Dream that have defined our nation during the past two centuries.

In the guise of a "middle-class tax cut," Obama is adding a tax in order to create a new welfare program that will add to the annual $400 billion that we currently spend on our welfare system. According to the Tax Policy Center, each year Obama will take $70 billion from the 2 percent of small businesses and individuals who create more than 16 million jobs and will send checks for almost $100 billion to more than 40 percent, or approximately 60 million Americans, who pay no taxes at all.

Cleverly, Obama has called his transfer a "refundable tax credit" instead of "income redistribution." Indeed, to label as a "refund" a payment that the recipient has never funded is wordsmithing on steroids.
 
When Bill Clinton turned "welfare" into "workfare" in 1996 and created 22 million jobs for Americans, he said, "We are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be -- a second chance, not a way of life." At the time, then-state Sen. Obama called this highly successful policy "disturbing." Now, if elected president, he will re-create a failed welfare system while calling it "tax reform."

The fundamental problem with Obama's stealth economics is that his dogma will not make America stronger or fairer. Today, the top 1 percent of earners contributes 40 percent of the nation's $2.6 trillion tax intake, and the bottom 50 percent pay 2.9 percent of our nation's total needs. It has been shown that reductions in tax rates increase tax revenues because private enterprise strengthens the economy, which in turn creates a larger tax base. For example, in 2003 the richest Americans paid $136 billion in taxes, and after the Bush tax cut in 2006, they paid $274 billion.

In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama stated that "eking out a bare Democratic majority isn't good enough." Indeed, if the pollsters are correct and the Democrats win overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate, Obama, if elected, would easily implement both his promises for $307 billion of new federal spending per year and his punitive tax policies. The truth is that with the level of spending in the Obama plan, either taxpayers between $40,000 and $250,000 per year will have to fund the massive costs for the new programs he is promising, or the promises will be abandoned.

Perhaps more sinister is Obama's reconfiguration of the American Dream. My father made an inflation-adjusted income of about $50,000 per year. He never took a handout, but he worked two jobs. He taught us that if we worked hard and played by the rules, there was no limit to what we could become in America. Now, Obama is changing that compact with America. In Obama's America, there is a ceiling to the American Dream. He decides the level at which our money becomes the government's money.

There is a reason why immigrants fly to America to achieve their dreams. Now, in the guise of a "middle-class tax cut," Obama is threatening that dream. If he succeeds, Obama will bring the kind of radical transformation that this country does not need and never has. And the country will be in for a shock.

End