President Obama works under the premise that while you can’t fool all the people all the time, you can full enough of the people all the time to get re-elected. His latest claim that he is not out to redistribute wealth but only to “invest” in America is a case in point.

In his exchange with Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, in October 2008, just before a debate with then presidential candidate John McCain, President Obama said the following:

“My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off if you’re gonna be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

It was during this exchange that then candidate Obama offered justification for increasing the tax rate for people making more than $250,000 per year.

Now President Obama is telling his gullible audiences that that his call for tax increases on the rich is not an attempt to “redistribute wealth.” They are “investments”:

“So these investments — in things like education and research and health care — they haven’t been made as some grand scheme to redistribute wealth from one group to another. . . . This is not some socialist dream.

Yes it is. He’s using the same rhetoric and choosing the same types of audiences that every advocate of socialism uses. This time it was Florida Atlantic University. What do you think these college kids were thinking when they heard President Obama say “investments in things like education”? Free tuition.

If money is taken from some people and given to other people, that’s wealth redistribution, the very definition of socialism.

In almost every speech the President has given, he pushes taxing higher income earners. I believe there are two reasons for his taxation goals. First, by taxing the so-called rich, the government has more money to “invest” in programs that are said to help those who aren’t as “lucky” (Obama’s word) as high income earners. The goal is to buy votes.

Of course, this extra money only reaches a few people as it is eaten up by the huge bureaucracy that’s created in order to implement the programs. The newly created bureaucracies end up becoming perpetual voting blocks for any candidate that promises to support the every-growing government.

Second, taxing the rich is punitive. The goal is to punish the productive out of some deep seeded resentment of prosperous people. While the people who vote for socialists like Obama may never get any of that invested money taken from the rich, they are satisfied that the rich don’t have it anymore.

It’s not much different from when someone keys an expensive car, leaving behind a large scratch in the paint. The vandal gets some satisfaction out of the deed, but he doesn’t get any benefit. Resentment and envy result in nations like North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.