Confiscatory Tax Rate Dreams from my Father (telling 2008 piece .. past becoming prologue)

National Review ^ | 8-19-08 | Lisa Schiffren

[STARWISE]

THIS IS a must read piece from Investors Business Daily. Barack Obama seems to have spent a lifetime pining for the father who abandoned him at age 2.

His first autobiography (and what 47 year old doesn't need two?) was dedicated to the man. Now he has issued the essential blueprint for the Obama Tax Code, and we find that it too is part of dad's legacy.

Naturally, candidate Obama Jr. wishes to raise taxes on the productive and the married, (especially two-income professional families — which will chase educated women from the work force, as the NY Sun discussed brilliantly, here)

And, naturally, he wishes to redistribute money to those who work less, or don't work at all — in the form of tax "credits" — which will put money in your pocket whether you have paid any taxes or not.

That is a trick devised long ago, (Nixon era, sigh), and enshrined in the (GOP-supported) Earned Income Tax Credit — which has always been a welfare program for the working poor. (Peter Ferrara explains clearly how Obama taxes = welfare, here.)

Under Obama, everyone who isn't "rich" — a number he won't specify, (but let's say — $250,000 per year) deserves support. And everyone who isn't "poor" gets to pay for it. The upper middle class, whose income ususually come in the form of salaries, gets to support the rest of the country.

As for the truly rich — well, a truly rich man I met recently told me about the process for obtaining a second passport and dual citizenship in a tax haven — which he had been investigating.

Applications are up. In our very mobile times, the truly rich, and the financial industries which make them that way, generally can find a way around onerous taxes.

But back to Bambi's dad. Barack Obama Sr., recall, was in the U.S. to study economics to help with the development of his dirt poor, resource rich country, Kenya. (A country the U.S. hoped to save from the clutches of the Soviets and the devastation of communism.)

God only knows what he learned at Harvard, but, as the IBD piece mentions, he went home to Kenya where, among his other activities, he wrote an article for the East Africa Journal offering a vivid critique of such capitalist entrerprise as existed in Kenya at the time.

The article, called "Problems Facing Our Socialism," makes the economic case that high taxes are morally and practically good, if the government then uses them to provide for the people. How high should the tax rates be? "Theoretically," he wrote, "there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."

Yes, you read it: a 100% tax rate is fine.

Obama Sr. continued, " It is a fallacy to say there is a limit (to tax rates), and it is a fallacy to rely mainly on individual free enterprise to get the savings." Free enterprise — bad. (He was discussing future government economic development.)

In the paper, Obama Sr. also advocated nationalizing all industry — and most commerce — for racial/nationalist reasons. He wished to confiscate the large scale industries which had been owned and developed by Europeans.

And, even more radically, he wished for the government to take away the small businesses that constituted much of the nation's local economy, because, as in much of East Africa, they were owned by Asians — Indians in particular. He felt it was wrong for Europeans and Asians to benefit from their investments and hard work, and that they would keep the Kenyans oppressed. Employed, but oppressed.

Obama Jr., the Democratic nominee for President of the U.S., seems also to have a problem with investment and productivity.

For him, it comes under the rubric of fairness — which is Obama's central moral issue. (Roger Kimball elaborates on this, here.)

Obama seems to feel that if you have figured out how to make your money productive, you owe some of it to those who haven't. And that suggests that, however the numbers get jiggered by his economic policy advisors, he will always regard the successful, the wealthy and the productive as a suspect class.

Even when the data makes clear that the rich in this country already pay 40% of the taxes, and raising rates will bring down revenues — a lesson that even Bill Clinton was too smart to ignore in the increasingly mist-shrouded 1990s.

Really, just what a country on the brink of a recession should want from a new administration, no?

[STARWISE]

The Obama Rosetta Stone-Mar. 12, 2009

Excerpt:

Barack Obama has written two famous, widely read books of autobiography -- "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope." Let me introduce his third, a book that will touch everyone's life: "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise. The President's Budget and Fiscal Preview" (Government Printing Office, 141 pages, $26; free on the Web).

This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it's a must read.

Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama. Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused. Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.

~~~~

Every day, his decisions signal apocalyptic changes to our very way of life. Is it pathological? Lord, help us.

[STARWISE]

~~BTTT!

[ari-freedom]

and enshrined in the (GOP-supported) Earned Income Tax Credit

I think this was a Milton Friedman idea of conservative welfare. No bureaucracy giving out checks to people who don’t work. it’s all automatic. Not one of his best ideas...

[knarf]

Interesting in that, mama seems to be not only the offspring of socialists, but gravitated to socialist people.

zero couldn't have been influenced by daddy because daddy was not around to mold zero's consciousness, but mama seems to have placed zero in good company (gran'ma and gran'dad) and perhaps through communication ... letters, phone calls ... directed zero's mental formatting.

I just don't like this man at all ... nor his gene pool.

[STARWISE]

More and more, I think the abandonment he felt by
his father and the crazy and erratic lifestyle and
ideas of his mother damaged his soul and bred a core
of hostility, consciously or subconsciously.

He’s twisted.

[Fred Nerks]

The “Rosebud” of Barack Obama’s Memoir — Part 1 of GREG’S GUIDE TO BARACK OBAMA’S DREAMS FROM MY FATHER.

There’s a big mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college? Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio- political counselor in high school? Why was he spending his time studying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, the pro-violence author of “the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialsm”, in college? Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia to attend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?

And there is more mystery in the book. Why does Obama consider working in a consulting house for international business like being “a spy behind enemy lines?” Why does he repeatedly find it so hard to explain his political views to others? Why was he driven to become a left-aligned political organizer? It’s a question Obama again and again can’t seem to answer to the satisfaction of the interlocutors in his own memoir.

If there is a mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. Obama tells us, “All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I .. tried to take as my own.” (p. 220) And what was that image? It was “the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals ..” (p. 278) What is more, Obama tells us that, “It was into my father’s image .. that I’d packed all the attributes I
sought in myself.” And also that, “I did feel that there was something to prove .. to my father” in his efforts at political organizing. (p. 230)

So we know that his father’s ideals were a driving force in his life, but the one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of those ideals. The closest he comes is when he tells us that his father lost his position in the government when he came into conflict with Jomo Kenyatte, the President of Kenya sometime in the mid 1960s; when he tells us that his father was imprisoned for his political views by the government just prior to the end of colonial rule; and when he tells us that the attributes of W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela were the ones he associated with his father and also the ones that he sought to instill in himself. (p. 220) This last group is a hodge podge, perhaps concealing as much as it reveals, in that it contains a socialist black nationalist, a Muslim black nationalist, a civil rights leader, and (at the time indicated in the memoir) an imprisoned armed revolutionary...

read more:

http://prestopundit.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/barack-obama-hid-his-fathers-socialist-and-anti-western-convictions-from-his-readers/

[screaminsunshine]

250k will be lower class after the inflation kicks in.

[dr_lew]

The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to "pay for" the fact of their wealth -- no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.

The widely syndicated "Cryptoquote" for 3/12/2009 seemed to have an editorial message along the same lines:

OUR AIM IS NOT TO DO AWAY WITH CORPORATIONS. WE DRAW THE LINE AGAINST MISCONDUCT, NOT AGAINST WEALTH - THEODORE ROOSEVELT

[MissDairyGoodnessVT]

othugo believes his apocalypse

[STARWISE]

This also sounds apropos, and he fancies himself another Depression-era president.

~~~~
Franklin Roosevelt

*snip*

By 1935 the Nation had achieved some measure of recovery, but businessmen and bankers were turning more and more against Roosevelt’s New Deal program. They feared his experiments, were appalled because he had taken the Nation off the gold standard and allowed deficits in the budget, and disliked the concessions to labor.

Roosevelt responded with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/franklindroosevelt/

[STARWISE]

Whoa .. that packs a wallop.

[dennisw]

More and more, I think the abandonment he felt by
his father and the crazy and erratic lifestyle and
ideas of his mother damaged his soul and bred a core
of hostility, consciously or subconsciously.

He’s twisted.

Even better when your own mom and dad abandon and fail you, you become more vulnerable to noxious socialism. Where the state becomes your mommy and daddy. 0bomo projects his own family life onto all of America to where Washington DC becomes the parents of everyone. And forces their industrious and sober children to subsidize their profligate ones

****  0bomos grandmother is the uncredited (by 0boma) hero in this story

[dennisw]

0bomo’s father wrote to him a lot. This kept 0bomo on the hook and always wanting. Finally daddy shows up for a few days when 0bamo is age ten and is gone again. This mysterious father gets elevated to god like status

While at same time hard working granny is denigrated. The one that got him into Punahou exclusive school and financially supported this mangy mutt. Granny had a serious work ethic but in the end 0bomo rejected this for a wise guy kind of work ethic where all you do is talk and theorize

[knarf]

As a man thinketh, so is he.

[Semper Mark]

We can use all the fancy psycho analysis that we want.

What it comes down to is that obama is simply a bastard
born out of wedlock, a sorry communist reared, red diaper
bastard at that.

From the white trash mother that gave birth to him, to his
marxist grandparents that raised him, this boy has had a
communist indoctrination from day one.

He's only doing what he has been trained to do.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is
old, he shall not depart from it.”

[Nateman]

This whole article is a postmortem. If we did not know this SOB was a raging commie we certainly know it now. I don't think any folks here on Free Republic were fooled but unfortunately for us places such as this have to be sought out, they are not part of the general background of news one would get by casual interest.

[Fred Nerks]

Was obama’s grandfather a victim - and WHY might obama snr have left Kenya BEFORE the airlifts commenced?

A VICTIM of the Mau Mau Revolt? You’ve got to be kidding me...

“Beatings and abuse made Barack Obama’s grandfather loathe the British
The President-elect’s relatives have told how the family was a victim of the Mau Mau revolt”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article5276010.ece

The growth of Mau Mau
The aims of the Mau Mau are clear enough. While the Kenya African Union conducts a campaign above ground for political power, the purpose of the Mau Mau is to step up the pace by menacing the authority of the Government and fostering trouble at all levels and by all means...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/system/topicRoot/The_Mau-Mau_revolt_/

The Times, Mau Mau 1952 Politics and Terrorism in Kenya.

http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/viewArticle.arc?articleId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1952-10-09-07-013&pageId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1952-10-09-07

One contradiction after another:

“...Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency...

SNIP

“...Mr Obama refers briefly to his grandfather’s imprisonment in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, but states that his grandfather was “found innocent” and held only for “more than six months”...

SNIP

“...Barack Obama Sr, Mr Onyango’s son and the President-elect’s father, seems to have inherited his father’s attitudes towards the colonial power. He was also arrested, for attending a meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), the organisation spearheading the independence movement. Mrs Onyango told Mr Obama that his father, unlike her husband, had been held only for a short time in the white man’s prison: “Because he was not a leader in Kanu, Barack was released after a few days.”

“...Mr Onyango was a victim of the fight for Kenyan independence, but his son became a direct beneficiary of that movement. In 1960, Barack Obama Sr travelled on a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, as part of a programme (sponsored by John F. Kennedy) to train young Kenyans to rule their own country...”

No he wasn’t, he arrived some time in 1959 long before Kennedy had anything to do with the airlift - AND HE WAS NOT on board the first contingent of students that landed at Idlewild in September 1959.

http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/teaching/2008_12/article.html

[25] Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Robinson appeal letter, Aug. 24, 1959, box 3, Robinson Papers; Smith, “East African Airlifts of 1959, 1960, and 1961,” 25–43. Barack Obama wrote that his father “had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States,” but a list of the students who landed in New York on September 9, 1959, does not contain the name of the elder Obama. Tom Shachtman, working in the African-American Students Foundation (aasf) papers for a book on the airlifts, has found that the elder Obama came in 1959 with support from the aasf but appears to have been routed a different way as he made his way to the University of Hawaii.

[originalbuckeye]

Mama was a communist. Gran’ma and Gran’pa were communists. Mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a communist AND a pedophile. Wikipedia used to have all this info but, thanks to zero's Internet wizards, it has all been deleted.

[SunkenCiv]

Naturally, candidate Obama Jr. wishes to raise taxes on the productive and the married, (especially two-income professional families -- which will chase educated women from the work force, as the NY Sun discussed And, naturally, he wishes to redistribute money to those who work less, or don't work at all -- in the form of tax "credits" -- which will put money in your pocket whether you have paid any taxes or not... Peter Ferrara explains clearly how Obama taxes = welfare...