Why do I think you should vote for Barack Obama?
I first heard of Barack Obama when he gave the keynote address at the 2004 DNC. He said a lot of wonderful things, but this stuck with me above all:
“The people I meet—in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks—they don’t expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead, and they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don’t want their tax money wasted, by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon. Go in—Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn; they know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things.
“People don’t expect—People don’t expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.
“They know we can do better. And they want that choice.”
This is when I started to be hopeful about the future. This is when I realized that some people DO see the world the same way I do. That some people DO understand that the economic solutions are not just black and white, where the Democrats say “throw money at it until it goes away” and the Republicans say “every man for himself, it’s the free market, baby.”
There IS wasteful spending at the government level, and government by itself CAN’T just solve all the economic problems of all the people by throwing money at it. But we ALSO can’t fall into the trap that says government has NO role in this, so we shouldn’t even bother to try. Issues of minimum wage, welfare, unemployment, taxation…anything involving the money some people earn and others do not, has been turned into a wedge issue, where the only solutions we get are either/or, the concept of “reaching across the aisle” is nothing more than an empty buzzword meant to curry political favor.
And later in that same speech, he went on to say:
“The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an “awesome God” in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
After at that time 4, and now 8 years after Bush took office, I was seeing so much division in our country, and again, everyone “said” they were “reaching across the aisle”, but voting records exposed most of that to be a lie. No one in our leadership really seemed to believe that there could be good ideas coming from the other side of the fence. And though I’m fiercely liberal and believe in much of the ideas on the left, I think one has to acknowledge that the best solutions are ones that everyone can be comfortable with. We seemed to have lost the ability to compromise, and it has only gotten worse sense then. I place the blame for this squarely on George W. Bush and Karl Rove, who perfected this sort of my way or the highway politics that says if I don’t agree with you, I’m just going to do what I want anyway.
My personal belief is, and has been as far back as I can remember that we live in the United States of America, one of the wealthiest nations there is, and as such, I think we have a duty to look out for the welfare of our citizens (not welfare as in government subsidized payments, but well being in general). We should feel a moral obligation to try to level the playing field for all, to give us all the same chances and same opportunities so that it truly IS our own potential and drive which determines how far we go. We should be able to (and should feel morally obligated) to ensure in some manner that if you are willing and able to work 40 hours per week, you should be able to earn a wage that pays for a decent standard of living…not an extravagant one, but one where you can afford to eat, remain clothed and have a roof over your head. We should also be able to ensure that you can obtain a world class education (as this benefits us all to have an informed citizenry), that you should be able to maintain your health, and that you should have access to the things you need to lead a healthy, productive life of opportunity…things that you would never be able to obtain on your own (infrastructure for example…roads, bridges, schools, libraries, etc.).
I personally believe that our current system of taxation allows for so many tax breaks and incentives at the top end for everything from capital gains on stock investing, to interest credits on property ownership, and so few for those who do not earn enough to survive. So yes, we create a “progressive” tax structure where every penny you earn over and above a certain dollar level is taxed at a different rate, which tiers upwards the more that you make, because the simple fact of the matter is a) the more you make, the more access you have to ways to shield that money from taxation, and b) the more you make, the less taxation disrupts your economic well being. Furthermore, we have so many taxes collected at local, city, state and county levels that are not collected on income, but on things everyone, whether they make 10 thousand or 10 million a year has to buy (and pay the same in taxes). When you really look at it, we have a system now where minimum wage at 40 hours a week doesn’t even get you outside the poverty level, it certainly doesn’t allow you to pay for food and shelter of a sufficient quality to keep you well. And when you compute the percentage you pay in taxes on your income, the person making 10 grand a year might see 3 grand of that go to various taxes, while the person making 10 million a year might see a million of that go to taxes. The argument that we should not make that 10 million a year earner pay more than the million he’s already paying (because after all, he’s paying 334 times what the other guy is paying) relies on you not realizing that the person who can’t afford the taxes is paying 30% of his income on them, and the person who CAN afford them is only paying 10% all told. But if you look at Federal Income tax alone, it’s possible that NONE of that 3 grand the low wage earner is paying in goes to the Federal government, so people will tell you that it’s the rich person who’s paying the taxes and should get the tax break, not recognizing that we’re not looking at OVERALL taxes, just one small subset that if we massage the numbers just right makes someone with very little money actually sympathize more with the robber barons working on Wall Street, and the guy living in a cardboard box ON Wall Street, eating Alpo out of the can.
What Obama wants to do is to make the OVERALL tax system more fair by recognizing that if you make over $250k a year, you’re doing pretty well, you don’t need more help than we already give you…you are indeed not paying enough into the system overall and therefore your taxes need to go up in order to make taxation more fair. And in this way, we can afford to do the things we NEED to do to live up to our moral obligations as a nation. At this time, we are NOT taking care of our own, and it’s by and large directly a result of trickle down economic theory which was Ronald Reagan’s big contribution to this country’s economic policy. It presumed that the more we cut the taxes of those who have the most money, the more jobs they would create and the more our economy would prosper, and further we should eliminate any barriers via regulation or oversight wherever we can to allow the large companies who employ people freedom to move and grow, bringing the economy along with it. The problem of course is that we’ve allowed these companies to see their rights come first over the rights of ordinary citizens, we’ve made it so their executives can be compensated like kings while they lay off, downsize and outsource regular Americans out of jobs left and right in the name of “competition”. They are not creating jobs, they are eliminating jobs, and they are not reinvesting their profits into corporate growth, but are rewarding their management and shareholders handsomely. We’ve seen the index of the major stocks that 85% of people in the US don’t even own skyrocket since Reagan took office, yet the number of poor people has gotten larger, the middle class has gotten smaller, and those with wealth have become wealthier.
Barack Obama’s plan is to try to get us back to something that makes sense. He recognizes that real prosperity is not going to happen in the way we’ve been pushing for over the past 3 decades. He realizes that if we give all the money to the people on the top, they will just pocket it all and it will never trickle down the prosperity we’ve been promised…and he has 3 decades to look at to prove his point. Whereas if you look at the economy from the bottom up, and do as he said, don’t use government to just solve everyone’s problems FOR them, but to give those who do not have the same opportunities as others a hand UP, instead of a hand OUT, we will see more money in the pockets of more people. These people have more needs at this time than they have money to fulfill those needs, so that money will get spent on the necessities of life…it will not get invested in blue chip stocks and hoarded away in tax shelters, it will not be used to invest in subprime mortgages that have been sliced and diced every which way but which have never really had any real oversight. This money will buy food, clothing and shelter…and as people do better, other consumer goods. That in turn creates new markets and expands old ones…as demand increases, so must supply. For supply to increase, the captains of industry need to hire new workers. When that happens, more people are put to work who weren’t working. These people now have money to spend on the things they need, and the spend it. Which means there is more demand, supply must increase to meet the demand, more jobs must be created to produce the supply, more workers jump in to fill the void, the cycle repeats, and eventually those with less money are more prosperous AND those with more money are ALSO more prosperous, and EVERYONE is paying their fair share in taxes…those who make more money are paying more as a percentage of salary in Federal taxes, but less as a percentage of salary in local taxes…it balances out, and the government is flush with cash to keep helping people get a hand UP.
Another facet to Obama’s economic plan is PAYGO, that is Pay As You GO. For DECADES, Democrats were called “tax and spenders”, but what we’ve seen with Bush and company is a new trend of “borrow and spenders” coming from the supposedly fiscal conservative side of the fence. And our leadership encourages us to live beyond our means…they relaxed rules on banking so these institutions that are now in trouble were able to borrow 30 dollars for every dollar in assets, and with cheap and easy credit we’ve been encouraged frequently to buy now, pay later. We’re told in the face of a national tragedy not to sacrifice, but to go shopping to prop up the economy. Obama is exactly what we need in my opinion, which is someone who will look at the entire budget, and say, this is what we need to spend money on, these are things we don’t need to spend money on, these are things we need to spend more/less on and these are things we could spend more wisely on. What do we need to do, and if we need to do it, we need to know how we are going to pay for it, we can’t borrow any more to do that. This is what Obama’s plan brings us…spending that makes sense and which is funded.
And so one looks at where he wants to spend money. He does want to help people out of poverty. He wants to strengthen our education system by funding early childhood through college programs. He wants to reward excellence in teaching. He wants to gain a commitment to community service from the young people by providing college credits in exchange for these subsidies. He wants to invest aggressively in green technologies and in weaning us off our dependence on foreign energy. He wants to make sure that every American has access to good quality, but affordable health care. He wants to re-direct our military spending so it goes to fighting our enemies and not starting costly quagmires out of personal vendettas based on deceit and an overreaching ideology.
I believe that under an Obama Presidency, we will have a more just and equitable society that works for a greater number of people. Conversely, I see in McCain’s campaign the ideology of division that has driven us to the point we’re at now. I have become extremely alarmed in the past couple weeks with McCain/Palin’s message which boils down to “Obama is not a regular American like you and me, you must fear him.” Every day I get a phone call or piece of mail or both, or see another clip from a rally where one, the other or both of them says something that is designed to engender a sense of us vs. them. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED IN NAZI GERMANY. I’m not saying that McCain or Palin or Bush or any of them is Hitler or anywhere near as bad. What I’m saying is, we look on 70some years down the road and think, “how could this happen?” We can’t understand or conceive of how an entire nation could just simply become so divided that there was just one side dictating everything and everyone else was silenced. But that is EXACTLY what is happening, because they are following the same facist playbook. Republicans unfortunately (and I’m not talking about regular, everyday conservatives, I’m talking about the neocons who are struggling to keep any power they can AT ANY COST) are trying to divide us, just as they were in 2004 when Obama spoke about parsing us into red states and blue states. Obama tells us to hope. McCain tells us to fear. Hope appeals to the greatest parts of our humanity…a desire to make things better not just for ourselves, but for EVERYONE. Fear seeks to divide us, to make us worried about “that one” who “pals around with terrorists”. And you can see it working….people at Palin rallies carrying around Obama monkeys, saying he’s a Muslim, a terrorist, is going to be bad for the white race, he’s an Arab, a Socialist, a radical. Here’s a man who committed his life to community service, and yet by playing on these fears that maybe there’s something he’s not telling us, we now have people punching Obama canvassers in the face, sending death threats to and vandalizing offices of community organizing organizations, openly talking about how they can’t trust a nigger to run this country. It’s a lunatic fringe, but this kind of rhetoric seeks to expand it, to build upon it, and to use it to divide us into us vs. them, the same way the Third Reich did in order to rise to power.
For my money, the choice is clear. Do you want a new direction? Do you want to try something different that we’ve tried for the past 28 years (something the explosion on Wall Street has shown was never a good idea in the first damn place)? Do you want to strengthen the social safety net that FDR put in place, which helped bring us out of the great depression and into the keeping up with the Joneses prosperity of the 1950s, or do you want to constantly unravel it until even our social security is left to be invested and lost on the stock market? Do you want a health care system than can cover anyone who wants it, or do you want that too to be forced onto the open market so the young and healthy can buy health insurance and the rest of us get a 5 grand a year tax credit but no longer have employer based health care and can’t buy it on the open market (that’s what happened with pensions….EVERY employer used to offer them, but no more).
Do what your conscience says is best, but don’t be afraid of the unknown, don’t let them scare your vote out of you. Do what you think is best for the country. I will, and that’s why I’m voting for Obama.
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Composing members:
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