Obama-Biden Want to Deny 95% of Americans Their Patriotic Duty

Joe Biden told us the other day that it's "patriotic" to pay higher taxes, and yet Obama-Biden are promising to cut taxes for 95% of Americans (impossible, by the way since more than 40% don't pay income taxes). Why don't Obama-Biden want everyone to be "patriotic"?

James Taranto has some thoughts:

Since Biden is resting his case on patriotism rather than economic efficacy, let's analyze his statement in those terms.

If paying high taxes is patriotic, then Biden and Barack Obama, in putting forward a plan they claim will result in lower taxes for 95% of Americans, seem to be trying to undermine American patriotism.

In order to avoid this problem, the AP infers that Biden has a double standard in which paying higher taxes is patriotic only for "wealthier" Americans. But it seems odd to say that patriotism demands something of one class of people, while making no such demand on everyone else. You guys, if you want to be patriotic, salute the flag. You guys over there, go ahead and burn it, we don't care.

What is more, Obama and Biden are not proposing higher taxes in order to serve some common purpose such as national defense. Rather, what they want, as Biden makes clear, is outright redistribution: take money from a minority and give it to "middle-class people." As Forbes's Susan Lee notes, many of the Obama-Biden "tax cuts" are actually credits, often "refundable" credits--which is to say, subsidies.

The Obama-Biden tax plan consists in asking a select group of Americans to sacrifice while effectively telling everyone else to go shopping.

Where have we heard this before? And can we really afford four more years of the same?

Obama-Biden are pushing plain old redistribution socialism, nothing more, nothing less. They want to decide who has "too much" and then in the name of "fairness" take the excess and give it to people who haven't earned it. There's nothing patriotic about that.