For Obama Kool-Aid guzzlers who believe Joe the Plumber was a premeditated Republican plant to trap Obama into admitting his communist inclinations (even though Obama approached Joe, not the other way around), I refer you to Obama's history of similar utterances in favor of soaking the rich.

In June, Obama said he'd designed his tax and spending policies to deal, in part, with the challenge of our "winner-take-all" economy, where the gains from economic growth skew heavily toward the wealthy. "A strong government hand," he said, "is needed to assure that wealth is distributed more equitably." He said he'd seen "no evidence" that tax cuts, particularly on business, spurred growth, calling the idea "flawed economics." He must be unfamiliar with the Kennedy, Reagan and George W. Bush years, pre-financial crisis.

In April 2005, Obama mocked President Bush's reference to an "ownership society," where "each of us are on our own, managing risks and returns in the free marketplace." When asked how "the government should help us share the risks of the new economy and reap greater rewards from the new economy," Obama replied, "Well, right now what we're seeing is the average American is reaping all the risks and not many of the rewards."

In September 2006, Obama agreed with a questioner that "there needs to be an increased focus on the common good, directing more energy and resources toward improving the income and standard of living of Americans who are not in upper-income brackets." Obama added, "I think the problem is that they've got a different idea of America than the idea that we've got." You think?

In March 2007, Obama said Bush wants government to have no role in ensuring that America is prosperous for all people and not just some. The "term for it (is) 'social Darwinism' — every man and woman for him or herself." Obama must be kidding to suggest Bush has no commitment to a safety net, with his prescription drug and education policies, to name a few.

So pardon us if we conclude Obama isn't a big fan of the free market and prefers that government be the arbiter of how much money we keep.

Equally disturbing are the repeated lies upon which Obama bases his redistributionist advocacy. Last March, he said President Bush believes "that all we can do is hand out tax breaks for the wealthiest few and let the chips fall where they may." But it is an objective fact that Bush gave greater percentage cuts to lower-income earners than to the wealthy.

How can these class-warfare demagogues sleep at night saying the rich don't pay their fair share when 2006 official figures show the top 1 percent of income earners pay 40 percent of the income taxes; the top 5 percent pay 60 percent; the top 10 percent pay 71 percent; the top 25 percent, 86 percent; and the top 50 percent, 97 percent? Just how much would the wealthy have to pay for it to be fair?

The more the wealthy pay the more actual dollars they will retain when there are marginal rate cuts, even when the rates of lower-income earners are cut more. When Bill Clinton's goons figured out they could mischaracterize cuts favoring lower-income earners as being skewed toward the wealthy because they saved more in actual dollars, we ceased to have a coherent, intelligible discussion of the issue.

Tax cuts are not "giveaways." When the government taxes at a lower rate, it is not "giving" money back. It is taking less money from the taxpayer, who owns it unless you subscribe to the socialist view that the government owns or controls the major means of production and the Marxist view that private property should be abolished.

Democrats lied about the economy for the first seven years of the Bush presidency, during which we had consistent growth and negligible inflation. The president spent way too much, but Obama will spend substantially more by design.

Worst of all, Democrats, including Obama, are primarily responsible for the subprime crisis yet are profiting from it politically. They created policies that led to it. Then they exacerbated it by installing and protecting Fannie and Freddie execs, whose bonuses were based on the volume of bad loans they made and who contributed to the Democrats' political war chests in return. Finally, the Democrats fatally obstructed the regulation necessary to ameliorate the problem once it arose.

Obama's tax plan is not based on economics (raising taxes in a recession, including letting the Bush cuts expire) but his idea of fairness. He wants to redistribute wealth by sucking the lifeblood out of producers. It's one of the oldest ideas known to societies. It never works economically but always works politically, which is all that matters to Obama.

Now don't get me started on national security.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His book "Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party" was released recently in paperback. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his Web site at www.davidlimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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