Politics
Out of context: Reply #3559
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- tommyo0
"(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: It's certainly a question the McCain campaign has kind of been hammering at portraying Obama as a socialist; you heard that on the Palin campaign as well. Is it working?
GERGEN: They may be making some modest progress with it Anderson, we do see some evidence McCain coming up a point or two here and there. But I don't think it's anywhere near close enough to win an election. And more importantly, I don't think the Democrats have really answered it appropriately.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was very much an advocate of what's called progressive taxation, and that is that the rich should pay more than the poor in terms of taxes.
Now, one of the most effective poverty programs we've had in the last three decades is called the earned income tax credit. It's a program where by if you're a working person or a working couple and you're below the poverty line, the government will actually give you money. That's a redistributive program. It's a program which takes money from the upper classes and gives it to the working poor.
Now who started that program -- the earned income tax credit, Ronald Reagan. It was an achievement of the Reagan administration that Bill Clinton then built on. So I think that these arguments are, you know, sometimes they get so carried away that they don't recognize the realities of what we've been going through in public policy and the big arguments about why the wealth over the last 30 years has been redistributed. It's been redistributed upwards, as we grow, the top one percent is getting a disproportionate share."
the link:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANS…
just about midway down the pageGergen bio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dav…
served as political advisor to Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.