SOCIALISM!

As more and more intellectually-challenged persons decry the slide towards SOCIALISM! in this country, Ned decided to have a look at the issue. He hypothesized that most people who screamed the loudest didn't know what socialism was. Moreover, if they did have a firm idea, it was probably wrong.
Ned believes socialism is a state of national organization under which the government owns the means of production, but he thinks that most of the Unwashed who use the term refer to some idea that the government is taxing people to death, or taking money from white people to give it to colored people. Or taxing the successful to give to the lazy, shiftless no-accounts who don't want to work for a living, or being in favor of a One World Government, or maybe just people who ride around in black helicopters making dogs bark at night.
With that Preamble, Ned suggests that this country is certainly NOT socialist if one means that the government controls the means of production (quite apart from the bailouts of GM and the financial industries that were brought about by avarice and greed on the part of the very sneering plutocracy that were bailed out).
Moreover, it is not socialist if one means it is taxing people to death. Taxes today are as low as they have been since before the Great Depression, especially on the sneering plutocracy.
If they mean socialist in the sense of redistributing wealth, then perhaps they are on to something, but of course not in the way they think.
In fact, the Great Unwashed have the stick by the wrong end.
The greatest redistribution of wealth the country has ever seen has in fact taken place since 1986. What has happened is, the working classes and the middle classes have seen their meager wealth transferred to the top one percent of people in this benighted country. That's right, friends, the very top of the sneering plutocracy, the top 1% of wage and salaried persons, takes home 23% of the wages.
And the top 1% of "households" has about one-third of the net worth of the entire country, more than the BOTTOM 90%. This is worse than France, worse than England, worse in fact than any developed country on the face of the earth. It is even worse than the Banana Republics of past fame. In fact, the ambassador of one of the former banana republics wrote an indignant letter to the NYT demanding that their country not be slandered in this fashion any more, given the wealth distribution in the US.
And finally, this country is not taking money from white people and giving it to "the coloreds", unless one refers to salaries paid to prison guards to keep in custody the millions of black men in jails, many on trumped-up charges.
Maybe wealth is in fact going to the secretive Organization to Promote Black Helicopters (OPBH) after all.