Presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) raised the prospect today of nearly doubling the capital gains tax if he is elected to the White House:

In an interview in conjunction with his big economic speech in New York, Senator Obama tells CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo he favors increasing the capital-gains tax rate.

Bartiromo reported after her interview: “Right now, as you know, the cap gains tax is at 15 percent. He has yet to give us a specific number. How high he wants that number to go? He has said, and he told me today, that he won’t go above 28 percent. So we are talking about the possibility of a doubling in the capital gains tax. He was averaging at about 25 percent.”

Obama also added during the interview:

What it will also do, I think, is allow us to… give some relief to middle class and working class families who have been driving this economy as consumers but have been doing it through credit cards and home equity loans.

Does Obama not realize that responsible “middle class and working families” also have investments that would be subject to nearly double taxation under his plan?  How does that give them “relief?”  It doesn’t.

The only people who will get “relief,” according to Obama, are people who have made poor financial decisions by living beyond their means with “credit cards and home equity loans.”

So, does Obama really represent, as he claims, a new kind of politics, or the same old tax and spend, income redistribution, socialistic scheme that the left has been pushing for generations?  You be the judge…