Op-Ed: Palin And McCain Are Socialists Too

Governor Sarah Palin and Senator John McCain call Sen. Barack Obama a socialist for taxing the rich and using those taxes to pay off for the rest of America. But both McCain and Palin did or are doing similar things.

The election in the United States will be over in seven days and the McCain campaign has accused Barack Obama of being a number of things. They say Obama has been palling around with terrorists, favoring infanticide, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, betraying the troops and then finally following “socialist” policies. It all started when Obama explained to “Joe the Plumber” that the rich should pay more taxes than the middle class in an effort to spread wealth around. The McCain team jumped on this and called it socialism. However, in 2004, McCain opposed similar tax cuts of Bush’s and said the top 1 per cent of wealthy people should pay more tax to pay for the lower tax cuts of the middle class. Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin called Obama, “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” but she practices similar principles in the state of Alaska; she governs a state that has no income or sales tax and imposes huge levies on oil companies that lease oil fields. The proceeds are given back in the form of an annual check to every woman, man and child in the state. New Yorker magazine says this check program is one of the main reasons Palin is very popular in her state. This year she added an extra $1,200 to this check, bringing the total to $3,269 per person. Palin’s family of five will receive $16,345 annually without working for one minute. Every citizen is eligible provided they stay a minimum of one year in Alaska. A few weeks before she was nominated Vice President, Palin told Philip Gourevitch at New Yorker about this plan:

“...we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”

The “Spreading the Wealth Around” concept is OK for the state of Alaska, but it is not OK for the United States of America according to Palin and McCain. Every other country has similar tax plans to Obama's, where they tax the wealthy more and the poor less. They are not socialist countries. Film maker Michael Moore also called McCain a "Socialist for the rich".