Is Obamanomics Socialism?

President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to save the US economic system has always been referred to by his detractors as socialism. But is “Obamanomics” merely just a system for spreading the wealth like it’s detractors claim it to be?


By: Ringo Bones


Our current global economic crisis can trace its pedigree back to the days of Reaganomics – i.e. the former US president Ronald Reagan’s view on economics that the Federal Government hinders rather than helps the US economic system. “Big Government” is bad for business and should get out of the way. Although right in many respects, I do find Reaganomics - as it was then affectionally called - somewhat hypocritical given that then president Reagan is staunchly against Marxist-Leninist Socialism / Communism. Yet he gave Wall Street overlords tax breaks and too much power.

It is a well-known fact that in the financial world – especially in the US – the existing financial power structure preclude their client’s opinions and views from ever becoming a factor in directing a financial company’s fiscal decisions. Thus the clients (this means every investing US taxpayer, including those government powers-that-be) must trust the financial company’s “top brass” – the Wall Street “ruling elite” to make the correct decisions for them. Using former president Ronald Reagan’s dictum “Trust but verify”, this makes the belief in an all wise and ever caring Wall Street a veritable twofold lie. A twofold lie because this assumes that the "ruling elite” at Wall Street knows what they are doing coupled with the assumption that the Wall Street “ruling elite” cares about the clients they are supposed to serve. But since socialism rests on the idea that one person can make a decision for another person without a working system of checks and balances, does this make the laissez-faire nature of President Reagan style economics / Reaganomics really just socialism in disguise?

I’m also one of those people who was never been able to have warmed up to the concept of trickle down economics – giving the ultra rich tax breaks to foster economic growth and working class prosperity. I’ve always viewed it like the way primitive cultures conduct human sacrifices to appease the gods. I mean if giving incentives to the very rich in the form of tax breaks really did benefit them, two things could have happened. Either they – the Wall Street ruling elite - would have been building mansions on the Moon by now thus generating an employment bonanza by hiring maintenance crews or have manage the economy so efficiently since the Reagan Administration that our current global financial crisis would not have happened. Ronald Reagan’s greatest oversight is probably the US financial system deregulation given that the root cause of the subprime mortgage crisis – namely mortgaged backed securities – had been busy making inroads into Wall Street since 1977.

Ever since the days of the Great Depression, successful schemes designed to fix the US economy always involved spreading the wealth. Each time the US Government creates roads, dams, and other infrastructure, it tends to spread the wealth around in the form of jobs. This scheme differs itself from Marxist-Leninist Socialism because it is governed by checks and balances that keeps corruption and malfeasance to the absolute minimum. But President-elect Obama better act fast on his plans to fix the American economy via infrastructure rehabilitation before the obstructionist policies of the opposing party can take hold. President-elect Obama should take advantage of this once in a lifetime chance of a party majority in the legislature to test out his Obamanomics to prove that there is hope yet for the long ailing US economy.