Shared sacrifice

President Obama unfurled a new school yard taunt this week, calling his challenger “Romney Hood.”  The moniker piggy backs on a study crafted by definitively left-leaning groups that presume to know the details of Romney’s future budget proposals.  Supposedly, Mitt Romney will balance the budget on the backs of the middle class.

But if anyone is taxing the middle class, it’s surely President Obama.  After all, the Supreme Court ruled in June that the penalty component of his Affordable Care Act is for all intents and purposes a tax.  Many who will be paying the new tax will be younger, less-established workers, the up-and-coming who are in many ways at the heart of economic growth.  That is, unless a Republican President and Congress are able to intervene at the start of 2013.

Is the “Romney Hood” label even fitting?  Maybe if you interpret the hugely successful capitalist as Atlas Shrugged pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld, a man who steals from corrupt “people’s republics” and bequeaths gold bars to cloistered industrialists.  However, the “tax cuts” that President Obama perennially refers to are not stealing from anyone.  Continuing with the ten-year-old, boring, existing rate is merely allowing high income earners to keep more of what is rightfully theirs.

If we examine the President’s rhetoric about income and wealth, it’s clear he has little real regard for the deep American tradition of ownership, particularly that which comes from “earned success.”  Consider his 2008 retort to Joe the Plumber, that all he wants to do with the little extra taxed income is “spread the wealth around.”

In 2010, and even into 2012, the President repeatedly sprinkled his speeches with references to “shared sacrifice.”  This is meant to conjure up thoughts of selflessness and nobility: folks who step up and offer voluntarily for a good cause.  But how are new taxes “sacrifice” when they are ultimately collected at the barrel of a gun?  This rhetoric ought to be seen as embarrassing and sloppy by all observers.  The rights to the fruits of one’s own sweat and toil, time and treasure are ultimately discarded by such a line of reasoning.  Utterly chilling.

If what we’re concerned with is a green-hooded robber running around in the woods and seizing wealth, we should be more wary of the man who has spent the last three and a half years in the Bully Pulpit than we should be of his challenger.