OBAMA PLAYING MR. ROGERS

“On Sept. 8, Fox News broadcast an interview between Obama and Bill O’Reilly that focused on taxation and the economy. Obama repeated his pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, while raising taxes on the tiny fraction who earn more than $250,000... His tax proposal, he explained, was a matter of civility: ‘If I am sitting pretty and you’ve got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can’t, what’s the big deal for me to say, I’m going to pay a little bit more? That’s neighborliness.’ If that is Obama’s rationale for making the tax code even more steeply progressive than it already is, it’s no wonder voters are having second thoughts about his economic aptitude. ‘Neighborliness.’ Perhaps that word has a nonstandard meaning to someone whose home adjoined the property of convicted swindler Tony Rezko, but extracting money by force from someone who earned it in order to give it to someone who didn’t is not usually spoken of as neighborly. If Citizen Obama, ‘sitting pretty,’ reaches into his own pocket and helps out the waitress with a large tip, he has shown a neighborly spirit. But there is nothing neighborly about using the tax code to compel someone else to pay the waitress that tip. Taxation is not generosity, it is confiscation at gunpoint. Does Obama not understand the difference? Perhaps he doesn’t. Eager though he may be to compel ‘neighborliness’ in others, he has not been nearly so avid about demonstrating it himself. Barack and Michelle Obama’s tax returns show that from 2000 through 2004, when their adjusted gross income averaged nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year, their annual charitable donations amounted to just $2,154—less than nine-tenths of 1 percent. Not until he entered the US Senate in 2005 and began to be spoken of as a presidential possibility did the Obamas’ ‘neighborliness’ become more evident. (In 2005-2007, they gave 5.5 percent of their income to charity.)” —Jeff Jacoby