Cenk Uygur: President Obama Is To the Right of the American People

Cenk Uygur former vlogger and now MSNBC talking head tries to prove the country is center left/liberal.

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To do so he brings the results from a few polls where citizens were asked how they would fix the budget. He sees in the results the immutable proof that the American people are decidedly in favor of bigger government and higher taxes. He might have a point. Many Americans don’t want to see drastic cuts to their Social Security or Medicaid, but as his interlocutor, Economist Peter Morici points out, they certainly don’t want the big budget overreach of Obama. How did they show this? It was done, not through polls but by electing a record number of Republicans, and not just Republicans, very conservative Republicans all across the country. What don’t people want? The people they elected to congress are expected to actually get out there and cut, even if it means shutting down the government.

Of course, where Mr. Uygur does miss the boat is that this isn’t the only point that makes people liberal or conservative. While Government spending and taxes is a part of it, there is another over reaching point, being liberty. Whose job is it to decide how you live your life? Large majorities of the populace think government is too big.

As he’s so intent on poll results, why is it that from the time liberals took over congress and started enacting an exceptionally liberal agenda the body’s approval rating plummeted? As they enacted more and more big government legislation, pulling more and more power towards the State, which is the end game of the liberal ideology, their approval ratings went down.

Near the end is when Mr. Uygur really starts going off the rails, pushing the same old liberal tropes of tax the rich, tax the rich. If the majority of people, who make under $100,000 a year, want to tax those who make more than that, why don’t we? Well, excepting what every economist worth his salt knows, that if you do that you won’t have many people making more than $100,000 anymore.

But, that’s not even the best part. Mr. Uygur comes to a stunning conclusion from the poll results that he sees: Barack Obama is way to the right of the American population. Barack Obama. The man who pushed for the nationalization of 1/6^th of the American economy. A man who has stated that he believes in the redistribution of wealth.

The truth is, as far as I can see, is that America is not wildly progressive as Mr. Uygur tries to use the poll data to show. It is, unfortunately, not wildly libertarian. It is, as Professor Morici states, whilst getting yelled down, somewhat contrary. The Republicans show up and want to start cutting, cutting, cutting and there is some reticence amongst the electorate, but this is in a theoretical poll.

The proof is always in the pudding. Since the 2008 election and the Democrats, lead by the most liberal/progressive amongst them, swept into power and began implementing the type of agenda that Mr. Uygur claims the people really want they’ve been shellacked at every turning.