Obama campaigning like it's 1936

It’s 1936 all over again . . .

While Republican presidential candidates are looking forward by proposing variations of a flat income tax, President Barack Obama’s tax-the-rich campaign strategy is lookingbackward—to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign.  FDR won his reelection, but the American people lost: Roosevelt’s new taxes on business and the “economic royalists” gave us the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937-38.

By August of 1935, Roosevelt had achieved some of his signature pieces of legislation: a new entitlement program known as Social Security, banking reform, pro-union reform, infrastructure expansion and massive transfers of wealth to the poor and middle classes.  Sound familiar?

FDR also ran up federal spending significantly: from 6 percent to 9 percent of the economy.

However, FDR needed more revenue to support his big-government schemes.  More importantly, he needed a villain to explain why, given the passage of his New Deal legislation, government spending and regulations, the economy was still struggling.

So he proposed raising taxes on the rich, which he dubbed a “Wealth Tax.”  As he explained to Congress in June 1935, “Our revenue laws have operated in many ways to the unfair advantage of the few, and they have done little to prevent the unjust concentration of wealth and economic power. … Social unrest and a deepening sense of unfairness are dangers to our national life which we must minimize by rigorous methods.”  President Obama couldn’t have said it better himself.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2011/10/28/obama-campaigning-like-its-1936/