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Obama’s Zero-Sum Game and the Coming Redistribution Bubble

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photo credit: rhett maxwell

As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama stated to Joe the plumber that the primary goal of government should be income redistribution. And in reality, Obama has made great strides with regard to income redistribution, having enlarged the food stamp recipient list, for example.

At the heart of income redistribution rhetoric is a principle called the “zero-sum” theory. This theory assumes that the amount of money in the economy is fixed, and therefore, a wealthy person gains wealth only if another person loses it. The amounts are equal, thus the total is a “zero sum.” It is only by exploiting the working class, Obama believes, that the rich have unfairly become rich. The role of government, then, is to achieve a more “just” and “fair” distribution of wealth — a “re-distribution” of the fixed amount of wealth in the economy.

Since rich individuals will not part with their money voluntarily, the federal government, through its taxing authority, is the only institution equipped to achieve this goal. The zero-sum perspective then mandates that only the federal government, through taxation, can produce the desired zero-sum equality by applying standards of fairness. So those running for national office are most likely to place income redistribution in their platform.

The idea that the wealthiest individuals should pay their “fair share” has been repeatedly stated by the president — not just during campaigns, but all during his first term. But a review of the president’s actions, however, shows that the zero-sum theory cannot accurately describe what he has done.

The zero-sum perspective implies that a balance will result if the money is taken from the rich and given to the poor. The bottom-line number of the federal budget sheet, then, should be a zero: as the rich pay more in taxes, the poor will receive more money through federal programs. This would follow from a literal interpretation of the zero-sum theory.

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Video: Obama-Style Halloween With Hidden Camera

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In this very funny video, conservative comedian Steven Crowder uses a hidden camera to demonstrate the innate unfairness of the redistributive policies of the Obama administration.

As children surround him, he takes candy from children with more and gives it to children with less. The kids are outraged. As they should be.

Crowder even manages to throw a “you didn’t build that” line at one of the children.

Lest anyone forget where Obama is on redistribution of wealth, here’s his famous statement to Joe the Plumber back in 2008:

“My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off if you’re gonna be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

And there are many, many other examples of this Obama philosophy. But it’s a philosophy fully rejected by our youngest generation:

Obama wants to kill the suburbs. Really.

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Photo credit: jdnx

Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.

The alliance endures. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America, which continues Gamaliel’s anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual leaders of the “anti-sprawl” movement, have been quietly working with the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social reform.

In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. Orfield and Rusk made presentations, and afterwards Kruglik personally met with the president in the Oval Office. The ultimate goal of the movement led by Kruglik, Rusk, and Orfield is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen through outright annexation by nearby cities, they’ve developed ways to coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence.

One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs. Step three is to export the controversial “regional tax-base sharing” scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban, municipalities.

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