Obama Pushing for Tax Hike on Top Earners: If You Make $250K+ a Year, Should You Have to Pay More?

I have no idea where you think you live, but this is a socialist country. We have socialized education, socialized police, socialized fire departments, socialized municipal utilities, etc. What do you think those institutions were 200 years ago? People paid for fire insurance, security forces known as Citizens On Patrol (COPs), private schools, private utilities, until the government decided that it was a common good for those things to be absorbed as a function of government.
Social Security is an institution of socialized government set into place as part of the New Deal by President Roosevelt so that the elderly wouldn't fall into extreme poverty, Medicare, Medicaid & the recent generalized socialization of medicine with the passage of the ACA is the latest aspect of our society becoming increasingly socialized. Face it, you live in a reasonably successful model of socialized government. If you didn't ever recognize it, it's because nobody ever explicitly pointed it out to you before. Socialism is not Communism, & Libertarians are the ones who claim that libertarianism can't fail, only those who don't implement it properly. Marxism, Communism, Libertarianism, these are the forms of government that will never be successful because of the element of human selfishness & greed.
If we have an increasingly unstable society due to elements such as the labor market contributing to this state of affairs, then we need to be able to take care of the weakest of us, the elderly, the children, the disabled, & especially the veterans because they have served their country. This is an idea that is Christianity in action, yet I see conservatives & Republicans eschewing these kinds of beliefs in favor of a society where everyone is left to fend for themselves, an idea that is in direct contradiction to the phrase in the preamble to the Constitution to "promote the general welfare" in this country.
This is a liberal country, the majority of people approve of liberal ideas whether they know them to be liberal or not. We are not a center-right country despite all the rending of garments, caterwauling, & pearl-clutching by the rightwing that we are. The loudness of your rhetoric has, in no way, any relevance to the correctness of your positions.

Sorry Stentor, we may have established socialized aspects or duties of this country (fire, police, utilities), but that is a significant difference from Socialism. With the left it's always if we just invest more... if we just take a little more..... the problem is that there is never enough... when you ask a liberal or progressive (whichever is in vogue) they can never say.. THIS...(X) is how much the rich should pay, or how much should go for schools, or how many taxes should be enough. There never is enough. I notice that you live in California... hows that leftist mentality working out... how many cites are going bankrupt, your state is in major financial trouble, businesses are leaving in DROVES... and the left mentality continues to want to spend and tax their way out of problems.. If conservatives are so bad... why is Texas doing so well, why is Ms. Tina Turner giving up her U.S. Citizenship, why is the wealthiest man in France moving out of France and taking all his money with him.. Why do you think the rich are moving their money off shore... or moving where taxes are low.. DUH. because they want to KEEP WHAT THEY EARN...if people were allowed to keep what they earn they would be glad to pay their fair share.. however, with the left, they can never define what fair share is... it's always moving.. and the conservatives are not "fend for yourself", but the left is if you have a hangnail you can get disability for that... I have no problem with taking care of those who cannot take care of themselves, but I don't understand how/why immigrant to our country can receive SSI or SSD benefits when they have paid nothing into it... I thank you for your thoughtful posting.... and good luck with the situation in Cali...

If you have socialized aspects of society that didn't exist previously, guess what? You have socialized society to a greater extent than before. I don't know what kind of taxes you believe existed in this country previously, but everyone decries the Golden Age of America as being the 40s, 50s, & 60s. Taxes were much higher then, after WWII, the highest bracket was 90%, lowered down to 80%, then 72% where it stayed during the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, & Carter. It was only during the adminstration of Reagan that the top marginal rate was halved & the tax burden was shifted to the middle class by raising the two lowest rates by a considerable margin.
The wealthy parking their money in offshore accounts is merely tax avoidance because of a mentality of greed, nothing else. The wealthy in this country don't work any harder than you do, or are any smarter than you or I, they are only luckier than you or I. Luck shouldn't determine who gets ahead in America, it runs counter to the American Dream that with hard work & initiative, anyone can get ahead & make a life for themselves.
I disagree with your contention that businesses are leaving in droves, we still have the greatest job engines around in both Northern & Southern California in the electronics, aerospace/defense, commercial aerospace, medical electronics, & many other science industries as well as the entertainment juggernauts.
You know I live in California, which is true, but I grew up in Nebraska, where unemployment was double-digits during the administration of Ronald Reagan for many years, & they had more republicans in office than democrats statewide, so that argument doesn't carry. Secondly, the stats in Texas are manipulated, for all states, job creation in Massachusetts actually outpaced that of Texas from 2008-2010. While over 126,000 net jobs were created in Texas over the last 2-1/2 years the labor force expanded by over 437,000, meaning that overall Texas has added unemployed workers at a rate much faster than it has created jobs. The fact is Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009. The unemployment rate in Texas has been steadily increasing throughout the recession, and went from 7.7 to 8.2 percent while the state was supposedly creating 40 percent of all the new jobs in the U.S. I'll take the gubenatorial management skills of Jerry Brown over those of Rick Perry anyday.