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| Top marginal tax rates under the Eisenhower administration reached 91% |
Putting aside the fact that Nixon's top marginal tax rate is greater than Obama's, his expansion of the administrative state alone should make him a Tea Party pariah. Nixon's Administration witnessed the founding of the EPA and OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration). Additionally, he proposed a Federal Law that would require all employers to insure their employees.
Eisenhower: Republican, Five Star General, campaigner against "Communism, Korea and corruption." No one called him a socialist even if they found the top marginal tax rate of 91% demoralizing. And not even after he said "[e]very gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed" in his farewell address. Heads might explode on cable television were Obama to say these words.
The bases of Obama's purported "socialism" are his tax polices and the "Obamacare" mandate, with softness on defense (based on the trigger provision of the Budget Control Act?) to boot. Opinion: if Obama is the measure of a socialist, then Nixon and Eisenhower, two Republican presidents, should bear the label as well.
