Here's what Obama said 14 years ago that is supposedly so damning (note that it was edited for "shock effect" on Rush Limbaugh's program, while I'm giving you an unedited excerpt here):
What we’re going to have to do is somehow resuscitate the notion that government action can be effective at all. There has been a systematic -- I don’t think it’s too strong to call it a propaganda campaign, against the possibility of government action and its efficacy. [The next few sentences were deleted by Rush for obvious reasons. - J] And I think some of it has been deserved. The Chicago Housing Authority has not been a good model of good policy-making. And neither necessarily have been the Chicago public schools. Uh, what that means then, is that as we try to resuscitate this notion that, uh, we're all in this thing together, leave nobody behind, we do have to be innovative in thinking in, how, what are the delivery systems that are actually effective and meet people where they live. Uh, and, and my suggestion, I guess would be, that the trick -- and this is one of the few areas where there I think there are technical issues that have to be dealt with as opposed to just political issues -- I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution -- because I actually believe in redistribution -- uh, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.
This is indeed a teachable moment, but not for the reason Rush Limbaugh says.
Context: Obama said this in 1998, when Bill Clinton was our President, presiding over a budget surplus and a booming economy, but just weeks before a hyper-partisan Republican-majority House of Representatives impeached him, and a few months before the Senate acquitted him. Like today, Republicans back then were attacking the role of government, saying, like they always do, that it cannot do anything right and must be cut to the bone. Like today, they were hysterical about Clinton's imminent diabolical plans to make the U.S. socialistic, take away our guns, hand over U.S. sovereignty to the UN, appease every country except our allies, you name it.
Irregardless (that's not a word, but I still use it) of the context of Obama's remarks, let's recall for a minute what the U.S. Government -- any government from the dawn of human civilization -- actually does, in pure basics: it collects taxes from the people how it sees fit, and then spends that money how it wants. It does not, for example, say, "Mr. David Koch, since you contributed 0.01 percent of federal income tax revenues in FY 2011, we are allocating 0.01 percent of the FY 2012 federal budget to you."
Since our government doesn't do this -- since no government has ever done this, ever -- then by definition, what our government does is redistribute wealth. Because, sooner or later all government spending ends up in private hands -- just not necessarily (and not usually) in the hands that gave it its money in the first place. If that's not redistribution then I don't know what is.
And let's remember that Big Government is part of the GDP formula that everybody learns in Economics 101: GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports), or GDP = C + I + G + (X-M).
So let me put hammer a big fat nail in the coffin of the idea that government redistribution is somehow new, or controversial, or evil, or conceived by American Democrats. In fact, that's pretty much all the government does, for good or ill. Chew on that epiphany, then try to come up with an example to prove me wrong. I'll be waiting....
(Irregardless, we all know that America has become a Socialistic country after almost four years of Obama. That's just a fact. We all wear government-issued gray pajamas and march each morning to work in the People's National iPhone Factory to the tune of revolutionary hymns and munch on moldy government cheese and sawdust-fortified bread 3x a day. Right.)
September 19, 2012 | The Rush Limbaugh Show
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