The Elephant in the Room: Chicago Robin Hood's plan

Socialism! That's tough talk from a Republican candidate who just voted to give the government $700 billion to buy banks, proposed a wholesale bailout of overleveraged homeowners, and favors a huge new government bureaucracy to limit greenhouse gases.

But John McCain isn't the only presidential candidate supporting these measures. Barack Obama sees him that $700 billion and greenhouse bureaucracy, raises him another trillion in government spending, and places a side bet on class warfare.

Combine a victory of either McCain the populist or Obama the liberal with public fear stemming from the economic quake, and the result will be greater government involvement in our economy. The only decision voters will make Nov. 4 is how much more.

While McCain and Obama are both liberal on other issues - such as importation of prescription drugs and, to some extent, immigration - they differ philosophically on taxes. McCain believes in low tax rates, limiting the size and reach of government and structured to encourage private wealth creation. Obama wants to shift the tax burden further to higher-income individuals and businesses, to increase the size of government and, as he put it recently, "spread the wealth around."

Limited government and wealth creation versus big government and wealth redistribution: There's much more than a dime's worth of difference between the two candidates on these matters of principle.

A central theme of the Obama campaign is that the wealthy don't pay their fair share of taxes and that the "middle class" needs tax relief. (Am I the only one bothered by Obama's overuse of the word class instead of income here?) He has been spreading this class-warfare message for some time.

Obama says that he wants to tax only those households that make more than $250,000 a year and that he wants to give everyone else a tax cut. He would increase federal taxes from 35.9 percent to 55.2 percent on every dollar earned over $250,000.

Obama also proposes doubling the tax on dividends for these taxpayers. The problem here is that most of these $250,000-plus couples are small-business people who are creating almost all of the new jobs.

As for all those "middle-class" tax cuts, there aren't any. The bottom 40 percent of taxpayers don't pay federal income taxes. So cutting income-tax rates won't help these lower- and middle-income folks.

Obama's solution: Create and expand tax credits for these people, thereby redistributing other people's tax payments to them. This Chicago Robin Hood would take from the rich and use it to give 40 percent of Americans a check.

However, you get a check only if you are doing certain things that Obama thinks you should be doing, such as going to college, owning a home, sending your kids to day care, or buying a "clean car."

In addition to wealth redistribution, socialism involves transferring ownership of private property to the government or the workers. No current proposal will advance this cause more than Obama's "card check" bill.

This legislation would eliminate a worker's right to a secret ballot in union-certification elections. Instead of federally monitored elections with private voting, union organizers would only need to get 50 percent of a company's workers to sign a card in favor of union organization. The bill would allow union officials to go to a worker's house up to four times to "persuade" him or her to sign a card.

This would do more to make us uncompetitive, and it would destroy even more jobs than Obama's tax increases.

Then there is Obama's play-or-pay health-care plan. It requires employers either to provide a government-approved level of health-care benefits or to pay a new tax for government-run health care for their employees. Call this what you will, but it's not a system that values consumer choice and private enterprise.

With the near certainty of overwhelming Democratic control in both houses of Congress, a vote for Barack Obama will most certainly be a vote for change - sweeping, dramatic, liberal and even radical change.

McCain is no conservative, but a vote for him is, at least, a vote for a check on such excesses - a moderating, measured, middle-of-the-road, and much-needed check.