When will a certain McCain supporter wake up to the great lie?

[acroyear]

The Wurzelbacher Effect - washingtonpost.com:

Take a look at the biggest-ticket items in the federal budget: Almost all, outside of spending on defense and veterans, are premised on at least an element of wealth-spreading. In Social Security, as the Congressional Budget Office has calculated, retirees who earned less get back a greater share of what they put into the system than higher-earning retirees; the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program provides extra help for low-income elderly or disabled. That's wealth-spreading. Ditto Medicaid, the shared federal-state program to provide health care to the poor; unemployment insurance; the State Children's Health Insurance Program, for children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid; food stamps; and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the modern welfare program. Medicare, because of a sensible change adopted under the Bush administration, requires better-off seniors to pay higher premiums; it provides extra subsidies for low-income beneficiaries to pay for prescription drugs. The bulk of federal spending on education goes to students in disadvantaged schools (Title I for kindergarten through 12th grade) and to help lower- and middle-income students pay for college (Pell Grants). Most pointedly, since it mirrors the refundable credit that Mr. Obama proposes, the earned-income tax credit -- which Mr. McCain described in 1999 as a "much-needed tax credit for working Americans" -- provides extra income to the working poor.

It's not at all clear that Mr. McCain actually buys into -- or has seriously thought through -- the implications of the conversation he has unleashed. "Taxes pay to keep our government secure, to help those who can't help themselves and other functions of government," he told CNN's Larry King the other night. But a graduated income tax, he argued, is "a far cry from taking from one group of Americans and giving to another. I mean, that's dramatically different." Really?

[...]

Ironically -- perversely, even -- the railing against wealth-spreading comes at a time when the wealth has been spread less evenly than ever, although the economic downturn will no doubt reverse the trend temporarily. As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities testified before the House Ways and Means Committee the other day, in 2006 the share of pre-tax income flowing to the top 1 percent of households reached its highest level since 1928. The share of after-tax income going to the top 20 percent and the top 1 percent in 2005 was the highest on record since the Congressional Budget Office began analyzing the data in 1979. Some of this is due to the structure of the Bush tax cuts, which -- as Mr. McCain pointed out at the time they were enacted -- disproportionately favored the wealthiest Americans. Mr. Obama's proposal to roll back the top bracket tax cuts and to bolster the bottom with refundable credits is an effort to address this inequity.

"I don't know when we decided to make a virtue out of selfishness," Mr. Obama said in Missouri on Friday. Not quite "ask not what your country can do for you" lyricism. But a start, perhaps

I don't know, Mr. O. I think that selfishness has often been at the very heart of the "family values" movement for the last 20 years.