Obama and Redistribution

by Gerard Emershaw

It has become a meme, and a rather annoying meme at that. President Obama is a socialist. President Obama is a Marxist. President Obama favors redistribution of wealth. The first two of these claims are incorrect. The third is correct, but the redistribution of wealth is not what the Rush Limbaughs, Ann Coulters, and Glenn Becks of the world believe.

If President Obama is a socialist and has been redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor in some sort of Marxist fashion, one would expect empirical data to verify this. However, the data tells just the opposite story. For example, the number of Americans living in poverty has grown to over 50 million under Obama. The number of homeless public school students has risen to over 1 million. Median household income in the United States has fallen for four years in a row. Over 15% of Americans are considered “food insecure.” Such a drop in income obviously affects poorest Americans disproportionately. If President Obama is a Marxist and has been redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor, then why are the poor getting poorer in the United States?

And why are the rich getting richer? The wealthiest 400 Americans have the same combined wealth as the bottom half of the American population. The top 1% owns 40% of the wealth and earns 19% of the income. Of nations in the industrialized world, the United States ranks near the bottom on income equality. Nations which compare with the United States in terms of income equality include Cameroon, Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, Ecuador.

President Obama is simply not a socialist. He is more appropriately viewed as a corporatist. The centerpiece of his presidency—“Obamacare”—is not a socialist style government single payer model. It is more like a corporate welfare program that benefits big insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. President Obama’s many wars and “kinetic military actions” are nothing if not welfare programs for the Military-Industrial Complex. The Obama administration has been filled with members with connections to Goldman Sachs yet hardly any left wing radicals. Van Jones is long gone, and the much scapegoated Bill Ayers never worked for the administration. While the middle class and working poor in the United States have been struggling with President Obama in the White House, the big banks have been making huge profits—nearly $35 billion in 2012. In fact, the allegedly Marxist and anti-business Obama has been a godsend for corporate profits. Corporate profits have grown an average of 77% yearly under President Obama.

President Obama is many things. He is an imperial president. He is an anti-constitutionalist. He is a warmonger. He is a fearmonger. He is often a hypocrite. He is a corporatist. But he is not a Marxist or a socialist of any type despite his beginnings as a community organizer, despite his radical friends, and despite his leftist rhetoric prior to becoming commander-in-chief. If President Obama’s opponents are unable to correctly characterize him, they are unlikely to ever be able to defeat him or his likely successor Hillary Clinton.