“Tax and spend liberals”

[eridani]

It’s about time that Democrats quit cowering when attacked with this meme, which is fundamentally an attack on the very idea of public goods. Taxing and spending happens to be the government’s job. Government exists to fund the public goods that are the infrastructure of a modern society, without which no private businesses can function. The funding is raised by taxation. Tax and spend liberals want the public goods paid for by taxes to be available to everyone.

Not like “tax and spend conservatives” at all. Tax and spend conservatives want to tax only blue states, counties and cities and spend the money only in red states, counties and cities. They want to tax little people in order to give obscenely rich people even more money.

But public goods are “socialist,” which makes them very bad. The real lovers of socialism are actually conservatives—they think it’s such a great thing that only white people deserve to have it.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/27/palin-shares-wealth/

Just last month, in an interview with Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker, Palin explained the windfall profits tax that she imposed on the oil industry in Alaska as a mechanism for ensuring that Alaskans “share in the wealth” generated by oil companies:

“And Alaska—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. … It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans”

Isn’t that special? Karl the Marxist might have said exactly that, supposing that he had written in schizophrenic word salad instead of academic German.

Breaking conservative framing--it's what's for dinner!