WEST: You may recognize this famous quote. From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. That’s from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obamanot being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?BIDEN: Are you joking? Is...is this a joke?WEST: No.BIDEN: Is that a real question?WEST: that’s a question.BIDEN: (laughing) He is not spreading the wealth around. He's talking about giving the middle class an opportunity to get back the tax breaks they used tohave. What has happened just this year, people making $1.4 million dollars average, the top 1%, good, decent American people, are gonna get an $87 billiontax cut. A new one on top of last year. We think the people should be getting that tax break are not redistribute the wealth up, we think middle class tax payers should get a tax break. That’s what we think. It’s a ridiculous comparison with all due respect....WEST: Getting back to the spreading the wealth question. What do you say to the people who are concerned that Barak Obama will want to turn American into a socialist country much like Sweden.BIDEN: I don't know anybody who thinks that except in the far right wing of the Republican Party.
I think Ms. West's first question is over the top, but her rephrasing the question in terms of European socal liberalism is spot on.
As someone with a degree in philosophy (and who, in fact, took a course which included key works by Marx), I would love to discuss this topic at length, but that's beyond the scope of this post. What Ms. West is describing is an ideal communist end-state, but the slogan predated Karl Marx in the socialist literature. It was thought that socialism was an interim state; for example, Soviet leader Stalin cited a more grounded principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work." The critique of capitalism includes the assertion that essentially idle owners disproportionately reap the rewards of an enterprise's products or services. In a socialist society, you see collective ownership of enterprises; you still retain some incentives for workers whom produce more or better goods and services, but the major benefits are retained collectively and not the privileged few.
Obama is a Social Liberal
Obama isn't a socialist (or Marxist); for example, he's not calling for nationalizing health care (but working with existing company-sponosored health insurance), and he's talking about capital gains cuts for small business. However, he is a social liberal; social liberalism differs from classical liberalism by its focus on collectivism vs. individualism. This is absolutely clear in the 2001 WBEZ interview quoted in my "Themes for Campaign Final Week" post; the "negative liberties" he's referring to are our individual rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. [I also have a more thorough discussion of this topic in my "American Conservatism and the 2008 Election".] What he's referring to as the things that the federal/state government must do for you; social liberals call those positive rights/liberties. The idea is that Americans aren't really participating in our free society without a certain amount of economic security and opportunities, e.g., free/guaranteed education, unemployment/welfare, a "living wage", retirement and disability income, national health care, etc. Throughout Obama's interviews, you see Obama put down the concepts of individualism and constantly harping on the benefits of community organizing, political involvement, and the economic power of "coming together".
The New Deal and Great Society programs are to some extent redistributive ("progressive") in nature; we have a welfare system, minimum wage, public housing, and other programs consistent with a social liberal agenda. There's a CBO study that shows even when you factor in lower lifespans for lower-income lifetime workers, their ratio of aggregate benefits to taxes paid into the system is higher. The theory behind our progressive income tax system, generally supported by most economists (even classical economists such as Adam Smith), is that given high upfront living costs, lower-income people have less discretionary income to bear an equal share of government cost burden.
There is no doubt Obama is sympathic to a quantum leap forward in terms of a "progressive" agenda, although he's not trying to push the upper brackets past Clinton's (at least presently). There are a few principal concerns we conservatives have with that: (1) our existing progressive infrastructure, entitlements (e.g., social security and Medicare) have chronic reserve issues and need to be addressed before we even begin to contemplate expanding the government's footprint, especially given bloated twin (operational and trade) deficits; (2) a "soak-the-rich/spread-the-wealth" strategy, especially given the capital investment necessary to compete globally against the rising Asian economies, is exactly the wrong thing to do to grow jobs, which seems to be, on paper, a Democratic priority. We fiscal conservatives (including John McCain) believe that the issue is not so much the aggregate spending levels but the effectiveness of that spending. We believe that fiscal liberals, arguing too little water in a leaky bucket reaches the target location, focus on expanding bigger leaky buckets; fiscal conservatives believe on patching the leaky bucket itself.
There is no doubt that Obama admires the higher social welfare net, increased worker protection/regulations and other social democrat programs or priorities in Europe; we American conservatives are concerned about imitating public burdens and policies which have resulted in lower economic growth and higher unemployment, given higher barriers to entry and exit of relevant jobs.
That being said, even if Obama wins this election, he cannot claim a mandate for a greater government footprint, even though we conservatives suspect a bait-and-switch agenda. For example, his own health care proposal doesn't mandate adult participation. This election largely reflects a dissatisfaction with George Bush's Presidency, especially over the past 4 years, and an unprecedented economic crisis when people have anxiety about their mounting bills, retirement portfolio losses, job security, maintaining health care coverage if they lose their jobs, etc. Unfortunately, the voters are probably buying into the Clinton "golden age" nonsense; we had a Nasdaq stock bubble essentially funded by easy Fed money, an overreaction to the hyped Y2K fears. We are locked into a global economic struggle with Asian countries producing more competent scientists and engineers while Democrats have had a vested interest in a monopolistic failing public school system and requiring us to import more and more energy supplies because of higher barriers of entry to domestic energy exploration and nuclear power plant construction.
The problem with Obama's simplistic income inequity analysis is that it ignores the dynamic effects of lower tax rates on stimulating the well-to-do to put more dollars into play, and higher pay at the upper ends reflects more of a competition for a relatively small number of executitives capable of competing on the global stage. Conservatives, in response to struggles of many workers to keep up with the cost of living, note that some of the problems in living costs reflect the consequences of counterproductive liberal policies, e.g., gasoline and food costs.
Biden's Response
Joe Biden's response is simply a state of denial. In fact, Obama has made a de facto quid pro quo between increasing the upper tax brackets and paying for tax credits and/or tax cuts for the bottom 95%; Obama himself used the phrase "spread some wealth around." Joe Biden, in a different interview, indicated to higher-income workers that "it's patriotic to pay taxes". (So the bottom 40% who don't pay taxes aren't very patriotic?) Basically, McCain and Obama both would retain the Bush lower tax bracket rates, including for investment income. There are some minor differences (e.g., McCain expands certain exemptions), but what Biden is referring to are not tax cuts per se but an assortment of unprecedented tax credits over and beyond, say, mortgage interest deductibility: savings credits, mortgage interest credits, new car credits, child care credits, etc. Why we are talking about the federal government subsidizing more household expenses? The problem we classical (economics) liberals (i.e., conservatives) have with this is a question of moral hazards, e.g., erosion in personal responsibility. What we prefer is for workers in commodity labor occupations (where the supply exceeds demand, such as low-skilled/ minimum-wage positions) to retrain for value-added knowledge or technically-skilled positions (or to move to geological locations with improved supply-demand characteristics); what Barack Obama wants to do--punish companies whom relocate certain factories no longer globally competitive and offer carrots for new jobs (while maintaining uncompetitive global business tax brackets)--is a short-term tactical response which does nothing but postpone the inevitable. We deserve better.
As for Biden's dismissing the concerns over an expanding social welfare state as a preoccupation only with the "far right wing of the Republican Party",
