Who are you calling Socialist?

If I didn't watch Fox News, I'd have no idea that we were in the midst of an American-version of the Russian Revolution. Didn't you hear? The new administration is looking to turn our country into a worker's paradise! As Mike Huckabee lamented to the Conservative Political Action Conference, “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

In the interest of fairness, moderate conservative David Brooks gave the Obama administration space to respond to these accusations. Here's Brooks' recap of what they said:

"In the first place, they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy that have been thrown out of whack. They’re not engaged in an ideological project to overturn the Reagan Revolution, a fight that was over long ago. They’re trying to restore balance: nurture an economy so that productivity gains are shared by the middle class and correct the irresponsible habits that developed during the Bush era.

The budget, they continue, isn’t some grand transformation of America. It raises taxes on energy and offsets them with tax cuts for the middle class. It raises taxes on the rich to a level slightly above where they were in the Clinton years and then uses the money as a down payment on health care reform. That’s what the budget does. It’s not the Russian Revolution.

Second, they argue, the Obama administration will not usher in an era of big government. Federal spending over the last generation has been about 20 percent of G.D.P. This year, it has surged to about 27 percent. But they aim to bring spending down to 22 percent of G.D.P. in a few years. And most of the increase, they insist, is caused by the aging of the population and the rise of mandatory entitlement spending. It’s not caused by big increases in the welfare state."

I think it's time for conservatives to take a deep breath. Whether or not you like the Obama economic agenda, this is hardly a revolution. If the budget projections are correct, we'll soon be back to levels of government spending, budget deficits and marginal tax rates in line with the past 30 years.

Of course, there has been a lot of hand-wringing over the plan to raise the top marginal tax rate. But people forget that as recently as the Reagan presidency, the top marginal rate was 50%, 10 percentage points higher than what Obama is proposing. We've come a long way on taxes, baby.