Colin Powell: Endorses Obama, admits to being Socialist

Cross-posted from The Progressive Pulse.

As everyone knows by now, Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama for President. But the most interesting information was revealed in Powell’s question-and-answer session after his appearance on Meet the Press. It seems Powell is not too thrilled with the McCarthyism of John McCain and Sarah Palin and their smears of Obama as a Socialist. Here is what Powell had to say about taxes and the negativity of the McCain campaign:

I was troubled a couple of weeks ago when in the middle of the crisis, the [McCain] campaign said, “We’re going to go negative,” and they announced it, “We’re going to go negative and attack [Obama's] character through Bill Ayers.” Now I guess the message this week is, “We’re going to call him a socialist, Mr. Obama is now a socialist, because he dares to suggest that maybe we ought to look at the tax structure that we have.”

Taxes are always a redistribution of money. Most of the taxes that are redistributed go back to those who paid them, in roads and airports and hospitals and schools. And taxes are necessary for the common good. And there is nothing wrong with examining what our tax structure is or who should be paying more, who should be paying less. And for us to say that that makes you a socialist, I think is an unfortunate characterization that isn’t accurate.

I don’t want my taxes raised. I don’t want anybody else’s taxes raised. But I also want to see our infrastructure fixed. I don’t want to have a $12 trillion national debt, and I don’t want to see an annual deficit that’s over $500 billion heading toward a trillion. So, how do we deal with all of this?

And that’s the point. Taxes will always be paid by Americans. Every administration sets tax policy. It is silly to say that Obama is a “socialist” because he wants to return to the same tax policies that we had in the 1990’s under Bill Clinton. It’s a matter of fairness. The middle-class has been propping up the upper class for 30 years. It’s time for the tax pendulum to swing the other way in favor of working families.

If nothing else, it should be entertaining to watch right-wing heads explode in Freedomworld as the banks are nationalized and people making more then $250,000 go back to Clinton era marginal tax rates.