Few people would argue that FDR wasn’t our greatest president since Lincoln. Even those retards that put Ronald Reagan on a higher pedestal are likely to give FDR a silver or bronze. But if FDR’s policies (like a pre-war marginal income tax rate of 81% on income over $5 million) were socialist, then what does that say about socialism? One of our greatest presidents taxed income over $200,000 at a 94% rate in 1944-1945. It paid for the defeat of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. But we can’t pay 39.6% on income over $250,000 (as we did in 1994), while our troops are bogged down in another two-front war, without being called socialists? And if FDR wasn’t a socialist, then how can Obama be one?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Anyone on earth can be a Socialist if the term is a negative catch-all signifying foreign/weird/bad & relatively few in the receptive audience know the anything about actual Socialism.
Presto!
Once you seperate the terms used from their actual definitions, it’s all easy.
FDR gave massive return on Capital’s investment during and after the ultimate winning of the War.
Benefits included: providing US capital preferential access to the world’s resources; doling out the losers’ businesses and assets; massive, often fraudulent government contracts and the erection of patronage systems benefiting establishment Capital, but often expressed through the programs of the New Deal (a formula for mismanagement, corruption and graft).
Posterchild of this was Bretton Woods:
The New Deal was: allow us to invest in the state and it’s people on your dime in exchange for participation in the markets created by the above ‘access’. It created a crazy powerful nation, but doomed it as well.
After the War, Capital continued to be taxed in many of the same ways they were during the war. This would naturally eventually create a tension between the government’s ability to deliver further access and Capital’s desire to do with their money as they wish.
This conflict caused by the continued redistribution of Capital after the War (it was a ‘Deal’ after all, wasn’t it?) was incorporated into the heart of our system, influencing much of America’s bad behavior in the decades after: too continue to tax, we must be continually threatened (Cold War) or actually be at war to bring returns back to Capital (Iraq).
It is not high taxation in of itself that makes us do bad things. Rather, Capital taxation at any level would work in concert with Capital’s unwillingness to participate without ultimate profit to transform American policy to salve (GOP) or coerce (Dems) Capital rather than be committed to the defense of the Constitution, investment in infrastructure, rational regulation of markets, etc. This tension typically has supplied the content of the two-party political debate in post-War America.
Due to ballooning entitlement commitments, Capital has predicted and perceived a decline in return on their investments and has demanded lower and lower tax rates. They’ve gotten all of that, but little has been done about entitlements, so the question truly becomes what keeps Capital here if we can no longer go to war for their profit, nor afford to redistribute tax money to them.
Bush tried the war thing, and it fucked us all.
Obama, representing Hope come a bit late, has chosen to try to jump start the corpse of Bretton Woods through stimulus and backing banks loaning money to themselves with the hope of the reappearance of profit, the very criticism of American Capitalism at the heart of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and it’s character, Milo Minderbinder.
The Right is publicly ‘searching’ for their identity, but that’s a show. IMHO, their true position can only continue to be that they will once again represent the aggressive creation of Capital access to resources. If Obama is not successful in paying upwards, we’ll be back to Wars of aggression faster than you can type an endless rant..
</endless rant>
because “shut up!” that’s why!
this has been another wingnut answer to a serious question.
Because this question accepts good faith and logic on the part of the people who criticize Obama and call him a socialist. That’s not a serious position to take, Booman- people on the right have lost their effing minds.
From the Inflation Calculator:
So basically what I’m saying is we need to tax incomes over $3,500,000 at 94%.
You have answered your own questions, Boo. Not only that, but as Atrios always laments, our discourse is so dumbed down it is sad. Tweety’s head(you can insert any TV pundit besides KO and Maddow) would explode if someone mentioned your points on his show.
We are light years from having a socialist government. The Republican rhetoric is desperate and in no way to be taken seriously. They are even out of touch with what scares the the voters here in the US. Not socialism but the ghost of Herbert Hoover is what scares the American people.
ha ha ha! ROTFLMAO! Would that he were!
About 25 years ago, I was driving from Dayton to Chicago. In the middle of Indiana, I managed to pick up an NPR station with an interview of Gore Vidal. Vidal said that the United States had never had a Liberal government and he would call FDR a Conservative. The stunned interviewer then ask him, “If Roosevelt was a Conservative, what would you call Ronald Reagan?” Vidal paused and answered, “How about Reactionary?” It was a wonderful interview with Vidal giving out lots of little snippets about the Kennedy White House.
Keep in mind at least two things:
First the conservative talking heads need something, anything to say right now to remain relevant to their audiences. Screaming about tyranny and socialism is about all they’ve got. That and saying that we are in this mess because W and the Congress weren’t conservative enough. Whether they are being consciously disingenuous is another matter. I know many of their listeners aren’t. Lemmings
Second their is a bunch of revisionist history that comes up among the wingnuts every time FDR comes up. Mainly that he actually made the depression worse OR none of it did a thing to help and only WWII ended it. Both are gross oversimplifications of course but there is just enough bits of data to make that believable for some. Most credible analysis I’ve seen show FDRs record on the economy to be imperfect but his biggest mistake was actually that he didn’t spend enough to stimulate the economy.
“First the conservative talking heads need something, anything to say right now to remain relevant to their audiences. Screaming about tyranny and socialism is about all they’ve got.”
Let them continue. Seriously. I hope they do.
They did that for years about “LIBERALS!” pointing their fingers at Bill Clinton (a moderate conservative) and everyone on the left, as well. Through the years all of these liberal people look so good that the word liberal is on a pedestal and conservative is a dirty word.
Now they are screeching “SOCIALIST!” pointing their fingers at everyone on the left, even if they are, yet again and for the most part, moderate conservatives. And they will end up putting the entire idea of being socialist on a pedestal and marginalize themselves even more.
If they keep it up the far right wingnut conservative side of America will have to start calling themselves “liberal” just to be taken seriously.
I think you are right.
But it also concerns me. I am convinced that most every successful government has had “left and right” leaning factions. Politics is messy and it needs opposition. The left and right I believe are ubiquitous because both sides are sometimes right and both side needs the other to become better at leading.
The right is currently so clueless they serve little other purpose than to stir up right wing nut into hording guns and food, blowing up federal buildings and shooting cops
The buzzword control tactics used by corporate media to control our minds and lives pisses me off. I was listening to a podcast of The Joan Kenley Show called The Media: What’s True, What’s Not just now that addressed the ways the flailing, frightened right-wing newsmedia are creating false realities that actually do convince a number of Americans (including some of us). I guess throwing the word “socialism” around as if there is no difference between a communist country and one that favors social programs is their best attempt at re-training our political definitions in their favor. To me, it’s just ridiculous.