And we’ve arrived. Here, at the biggest soap box I can find. At some point, political pundits started saying that if the election is about foreign policy, McCain wins, and if it’s about domestic policy, Obama wins. For the life of me, I cannot figure this one out. The thing that makes me want to shake people is that I just don’t know if people really understand what they’re getting with an Obama vote. If you’ve truly looked at his record, and you understand who he is and what he stands for, and that’s what you want, then more power to you. But I just feel like so many people who claim to be moderate are getting sold a bill of goods into believing that Senator Obama is a middle-of-the-road kind of guy, when there is nothing further from the truth. He speaks so well. He says happy things and makes people want to buy the world a puppy. But he has the most liberal voting record in the senate. He is not moderate. I can absolutely back someone who says they are for a liberal/socialistic philosophy, if that’s what they want. But PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make sure it’s what you want, because you can be sure it is what you’re going to get.

According to Obama’s tax calculator, we will save approximately $1800. Now, from our paychecks every other week, we pay up a total of $20,774.26 just in withholdings to the government over the course of the year (though we do usually get some refunded). The $1800 we’d save would be great, but in all honesty, we probably won’t notice a huge difference in our monthly take-home. But let’s get to the part about how 95% of taxpayers get a tax cut. Sounds great, until you realize that 44% of them don’t pay income tax to begin with. And yet, they will still be getting money back. So now, not only has it ceased to be a tax refund, and become welfare, but now the IRS is in the business of providing said welfare. I’m sure that’s not in their job description, nor are they set up to handle it.

Some may be sick of “Joe the Plummer,” but to me, he’s real and illustrates everything perfectly. I’ve worked for a small business owner. There are many such business owners who don’t even draw their own salary from their business, and yet would fall above the $250,000 mark because of the tax structures. There is not the cashflow in such businesses to sustain a tax increase at the levels Obama is proposing, especially in a slow economy. The last president to raise taxes in this type of economy was Herbert Hoover, and I really am terrified that Obama could cause a recession to turn into a depression. The funny thing is, even Obama has acknowledged that his fiscal policies would slow the economy down, as he has said he might wait to implement some of them until the economy picks back up. That just doesn’t make any sense to me. And even those tax breaks won’t come in handy if no one has a job because their employers can’t afford to pay them. Trickle down is real and it works – unless you missed the nineties? In fact, it worked so well for Reagan, that it gave Clinton almost eight years of freedom before his tax policies started to mess things up again and turn the economy down. That George W. Bush was able to keep the already slow economy from tanking after September 11th is simply another testament to the powerful nature of low tax rates.

Here’s where the free agency comes in. I do believe that taxes are necessary, and even good. But I do not believe that the federal government should be in the business of running anything except the military, for the most part. They just aren’t good at it. People are good at it. Individuals are good at it. But the government is not. And it’s not about being a stingy conservative. Our household currently donates approximately $25-30 a day to charity. That is every single day of the year. And many people in this country also donate similarly. About 12 percent of conservatives and 10 percent of registered Republicans tithe. In fact, as John Stossel reported, of the top 25 states where people give an above-average percentage of their income to charity, all but one (Maryland) were red – conservative – states in the last presidential election. But when government takes, and tells us what we have to spend our money on, programs fail and people go unaided. And we’re not given the chance to choose for ourselves. From what I can tell, when the general population is given the chance to choose, they choose the better part.

Obama has promised to give us many things – better access to student loans, more community service opportunities, nationalized healthcare (no, Holly, I haven’t forgotten about you…more on that later)… the list goes on and on. But we will be giving up a lot for those things – a lot of freedom. In return, I also believe we will be getting a lot of class warfare, which always happens when you set up a system of the “haves” and the “have-nots” and causing one group to be solely dependent on the other. Again, I just hope people are prepared for the kind of change they’re signing up for.

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