Is America becoming a 'socialist state'? 40 percent say yes.

He defended consumer-protection rules and government investments in things like infrastructure and education. He said higher taxes on the rich, not just spending cuts, should be used to reduce federal deficits. And he talked about a general consensus since World War II that "the market couldn’t solve all of our problems on its own." 

Indeed, by the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of socialism as "collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods," Obama does not appear to be a socialist.

Obama didn't nationalize big banks during the financial crisis, for example. He says his health-care reforms will keep most Americans covered through private insurance. Even when the government did undertake recession-related rescues of private-sector automakers, it returned the firms to majority ownership by the private sector.

But the debate about the direction he is taking the country is a hot one.

An opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, titled "America Already Is Europe," notes that government spending in Spain and in the US account for fairly similar shares of gross domestic product. Spain has been governed by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party for most of the past three decades. The author, Arthur Brooks, who heads the American Enterprise Institute think tank, said the US also looks like Europe in things such as the progressivity of its tax code and the regulatory burdens on business.

Equating that with Soviet-era Communism goes way too far, some say. On Tuesday, movie director Milos Forman, citing his experience living in Czechoslovakia, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that Obama's critics "falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism."

Yet the economic results might ultimately be similar, critics counter. Today's collectivism is "brought about more slowly, indirectly and imperfectly,... but the ultimate outcome tends to be very much the same," with government control of the economy, the Investor's Business Daily editorialized, drawing on the words of 20th-century economist Friedrich Hayek in analyzing the new TIPP poll.

Still, public concern about government control doesn't appear to have ratcheted up much lately. The percentage seeing the US heading toward a socialist state was essentially the same in July as in March 2009, when the TIPP poll also asked the question. In August 2008, under President Bush and prior to the TARP bank bailouts, only 25 percent of Americans agreed with the "socialist state" view.

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