Palin hit the trail in Iowa last week and took her criticism of Barack Obama's tax policy to a whole new level. While the standard criticism thus far of Obama's plan is that it's a "job-killer" or even vaguely "socialist", Palin made abundantly clear on the stump that she thinks it's much, much worse than that. As Palin describes it, Obama's plan is downright communist (everything you own would "collectively belong to everybody") and would lead to what HuffPo's Sam Stein calls a "nightmare communist state."

"See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record... Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free. Let us fight for what is right. John McCain and I, we will put our trust in you."

Taxes have always been a ripe issue for demagoguery, but Sarah Palin is taking it about eight steps further.