Voting for McCain for Your Tax Bill? Think Again.

pigface.jpgMore bad news on the economic front today, yet more headlines beginning MARKETS PLUNGE WORLDWIDE ON NEWS OF… [enter latest giant insolvency or government bailout here]. I started thinking about how little the election coverage has delved into the implications of McCain’s or Obama’s planned economic approach. When discussing whether I am a Democrat or a Republican (I’m neither) I often quote someone more brilliant than me (author unknown!) that the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats want to spend too much on social programs, while Republicans want to spend too much on the military. Bottom line: they both just spend, spend, spend!

Which leads me to the issue of tax cuts. McCain wants to continue to uphold Bush’s tax cut policies, which sounds great on the surface, but really isn’t. Obama wants to raise rich people’s taxes and lower poor people’s taxes. Yeah, that’s gonna get him elected for sure! But in all seriousness (well, as serious as I can get), neither candidate has ANY SUBSTANTIVE PLANS TO REDUCE FEDERAL SPENDING. Instead, we just keep printing money and climbing deeper into the debt hole. My Republican friends and family are holding onto antiquated ideas that the Republican party is somehow less likely to impact your paycheck. The widespread groan is that Liberals and the ANGRY LEFT want to give your money to fat lazy people and their ungrateful children. This is viewed as offensive and unAmerican, terminally at odds with the great Puritan ethic of lifting oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. It becomes an argument about why on earth anyone should give his money to those people. Transfer of wealth.

So, do Republicans not realize that wars are insanely costly? That corporate welfare is insanely costly? That all this “nation-building” is a hundred times more expensive than just leading by example? It’s all just more transfer of wealth, but without the image of a begging lazy person attached to it. Even Alan Greenspan says the country cannot afford McCain’s tax cuts. (Yes, we can say that Greenspan has been entirely discredited, but I don’t believe that. His fatal flaw was to trust banks and other investment entities to follow good business practices. They obviously didn’t. )

It’s not popular to cut spending. Any spending, since it’s coming down the line to someone, and I guarantee thattax_compare.jpg someone does not want to give it up. But we Americans have been on a wild spending binge for a long time now using our children’s money in the form of loans from China for decades. TIME TO GET OFF THE FUN RIDE!! If you’re a Republican, you should be sensible enough to realize that it’s horribly self-serving to demand tax cuts when we owe so much debt. If you’re a Democrat and want universal health care or other insanely costly programs, be prepared to pay. In the end it’s what makes me a liberal rather than a conservative: I’d rather help Americans than pay for infrastructure in Iraq. We can’t have our cake and eat it too. The Fat Lady’s already singing.

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September 15, 2008 | Filed Under Election '08 

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