Let me start by saying I'm an independent voter and I think political parties are bunk, the thought that we only have two candidates to choose from enrages me.
Incognitus":226i8lme said:
Economically, Obama would tax the Middle-Class into oblivion to subsidize welfare programmes, whilst McCain would tax them slightly more, and yank the rug out from underneath their feet and continuing to encourage and enable corporations to move jobs away from Americans. McCain has said the right thing, but from what I can tell of his economic plan it is a shambles and does do anything to cure the rotting dollar.
Obama has repeatedly stated (and you can see it in his policies on his website and elsewhere) that he is not interested in raising taxes on the middle class. He wants to repeal Bush's tax cuts, true, but those saved most of us something numbering in the dozens to hundreds of dollars and the upper crust millions upon millions of dollars. He wants to repair the broken tax code that allows the wealthiest and largest companies in this country to pay under 10% taxes when the on-the-books tax rate, the rate small businesses and independents pay, is 30%. They do this by cheating, literally cheating, on their taxes, doing deals like leasing overseas property for no purpose and then re-leasing it back to the owners, giving the owners a small profit in exchange for a huge tax writeoff on the corporate side. The vast majority of the money that fuels government services in this country comes from that tax base (income taxes mostly go toward paying off the national debt), and McCain proposes leaving the Bush tax cuts in place and lowering the baseline for corporate taxes further, so that the largest contributors to government services will be paying less. Where do you think the difference is going to be made up? It's going to come out of our pockets, or it's going to come out of our quality of life. He'll do what republicans have been doing for years - cut education, cut transportation, cut the justice system, cut research grands to keep up a bloated and wasteful defense budget, pork and the sweetheart deals they've been engineering for ages. I'm not saying the Democrats are clean on this point, they're douchebags and have friends with hands out too, I'm just saying this is standard Republican policy and you really need to think about that before you decide who's tax policy makes sense.
McCain says he's going to do this to allow businesses to be more competitive globally and create more jobs, while out the other side of his mouth he's saying that he wants to break down barriers to free trade which will make American companies less competitive and send more jobs overseas, and that we don't have an employment problem. Listen to this man, listen to what he says. Now, mind you, I'm in favor of free trade, I'm just saying there's a fundamental disconnect here between his supposed policies and his supposed views on the economy.
Obama proposes tearing down free trade agreements like NAFTA (BIIIIG down point for me) but he also proposes a sensible solution of promoting worker reeducation, increasing the social net so that people who have lost their jobs will have more opportunity to change careers, and health care for all Americans which, if he does it well, will reduce our cost of living (or at least save us the choice of paying the rent vs. paying the insurance bill).
Let me lay something on the table here: there is NO, absolutely NO WAY American workers in low and no skill jobs like manufacturing and telemarketing can compete with overseas labor. No amount of protectionist tarriffs, no amount of corporate tax cuts, is going to put the tiniest dent in this problem; we are talking about orders of magnitude, not fractions of percents, in labor costs between American workers and Chinese or Indian workers in costs. Nothing is going to stop this torrent of work flowing overseas. The only hope we have of maintaining something resembling our current lifestyles is to increase our skill base, vastly improve our education, and provide opportunities for people losing their jobs to change to more profitable careers. McCain has nothing resembling a functional policy that addresses the reality of this problem. Obama's is ambitious and it's big government and I HATE a nanny state, but given the choice between ostrich and Mary Poppins what the hell choice do we have?
Obama and McCain have the same foreign policy... allegedly. What McCain has said about Hamas and Iran going back before the elections began almost mirrors Obama's position. McCain just happens to know how US elections work.
Obama and McCain have nothing like a similar foreign policy. Obama wants to focus our forces on Bin Laden and Al Quada and get out of tangential conflicts. I'm not convinced he has the slightest clue on how to do that but at least he has the right idea. McCain has shown no indication that he intends to make substantial changes here; he has continually parroted the NeoCon position on Iraq that "it's over when it's over and that's when we say so and the rest of you should leave it to us to figure it out, as we've got it right so far". I don't even know what's going on in this man's head on the subject at this point.
I'm going with Obama, because I want to see if he sells out what integrity he has or whether he's bumped off first: A presidential assassination would really liven things up a bit.
That's one thing I can agree with you on. Obama represents an unknown. I think he has the charisma and the will to make things happen, and I think his naivete actually has the chance, by the force of his personality, to change the way things work in Washington when everyone else is saying they know how to pull the right strings and grease the right palms and that we should go with the devil we know over the devil we don't (this has been Hilary's position as well as McCain's since Obama got on the radar).
I don't think experience and entrenchment in old-hat politics is what we need right now, it's a way of business that is proven to not work and cost us too much money, and that's what his opponents are offering us - more palms greased and strings pulled, stability at the cost of progress. The last thing we want to do is "stabilize" where we are right now. We are stagnating and dying, our economic "crisis" is a hiccup compared to the place we're going to be in in 20 years if we continue to reduce our relative level of education, technology, infrastructure and public services by keeping them the same or further crippling them. Iraq, if nothing else, has shown that our incredible military power doesn't mean DICK in the current global environment, and that's all we have going for us right now and that's all McCain is really offering us.
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Oh, the draft thing is bunk. I have a special place in my heart for people like Keith Olberman but the fact that he, or anyone claiming to be an honest journalist, can take some offhand statements and construe that into McCain supporting a draft in our current situation is fucking retarded. This kind of shit belongs on Bill O'Reilly's show and if he wasn't rabidly conservative it would have been there already; it's unbecoming of anyone claiming integrity. McCain is a military man, he was in Vietnam, he understands very well that a volunteer is an effective soldier and a conscript is not. We are not fighting a war of numbers, however much it may seem that way. We have highly skilled, highly trained troops who are, even when asked to commit to incredibly stupid policies, doing their job with unparalleled excellence. The last thing we want is to make them integrate with a bunch of guys who aren't cut out for the job, don't want to be there, and ultimately aren't going to hack it.
And that's the real problem with Obama in this race. He's the ultimate where's the beef candidate. Seriously, where is the beef? What has he done that says he should be POTUS. Love him or hate him but McCain's resume is easily better. He has stewarded bipartisan reforms and worked on a multitude of issues in congress. There is simply more experience that shows he will likely be more effective working with congress as an executor. Obama has nothing other than running for offices, and never completely pissing off old guard democrats. I don't get the love affair. At least Kerry had experience...
That's nice, except that by and large McCain has been backing NeoCon policies, bipartisan or otherwise. McCain is anything but libertarian, he was really involved in putting the NeoCons back together after the libertarians split off in - what was it the late 80s? Anyway point being McCain backs policies that are broken. I don't give two shits that he knows how to push them through. NeoCon policies have been instrumental in incredibly destructive events, like the deregulation that raped California (I was there, my ass still hurts) and ultimately turned Enron into the monster it became, and the utter lack of realistic thinking in Iraq - these guys think guns solve social problems, and get confused and obstinate, insisting that more guns are the solution, when that fails. They don't know diplomacy from the hole in their ass, which is why they shit all over it constantly.
They want lower taxes without lower spending, they want bigger military and big brother government without more taxes (and with utter disregard for civil liberties), they want a lower social net without increased education and job insurance, they want more privatization without any kind of acceptable standards, they want more productivity and lower wages - even in critical areas like once again education, they want deregulation *and* more regulation, whichever pushes their stock values up. They're dangerous idiots with big wallets and no realistic concept whatsoever of where the money they crave actually comes from. They are cynical to a disgusting level; most leaders in the NeoCon movement are agnostic or atheistic in values but (amongst friends) openly state that the religious right is their base and that they have to make every effort to pander to them and maintain their alliance; they think religious people are too stupid to understand that what they want for the country has nothing to do with what NeoCons want, that they're simpletons with big red "vote for me" buttons that anyone with a pro-life stick can push. I have listened to NeoCons talk to other NeoCons, I have read their articles and books, and they scare me the way being shut in a closet with a starving, rabid animal scares me. That may sound like hyperbole, but I seriously think the NeoCon movement is the worst thing to ever happen to the Republican party and to this country as a whole.
If you want to support a candidate that embodies what McCain supposedly represents, vote for Barr. Vote libertarian. Small government, lower spending, free trade, more civil liberties, less corruption. Personally though I cannot abide the idea of getting a closet NeoCon in office harping broken, backward-ass, faux-libertarianism the way every single republican candidate since Reagan has, and I will vote for Obama simply because Barr doesn't have a chance and I will not see McCain in office.
