Someone I know contacted me recently. They were unsure of whether to vote for Barack Obama or John McCain for President. Someone close to them and strongly in the McCain camp was beginning to persuade them to vote Republican. They asked for some clarity as to what things they were hearing were true and how "devastating" an Obama presidency be. I will be posting portions of a Pro-McCain, Anti-Obama letter they received and my response to each portion, minus identifiable names over the next few days. Read on and post your comments :)

LETTER- PART ONE

...Obama can NOT get elected.

I will send a lonnngger email explaining this all tomorrow... but here's the gist of it:

1. Obama is a socialist. I know that you know this.... but he's planning on a compete re-distribution of the wealth... not only giving huge tax breaks to the laziest and lowest of them all, but even giving "tax breaks" to people that pay ZERO taxes and dont contribute to the system at all! In otherwords, WELFARE.... taking from my dad... taking from YOU.... taking from your brother and your parents and alllll the hard working people out there.... and re-distributing it to people that dont work at all... and that dont contribute to the system in any way shape or form. If Obama is elected, my dad will be forced to cough up over 250,000 in JANUARY ALONE to feed these lowly leeches of society.
Not going to help the suffering economy, to say the least. And, looks like there is no retirement in sight for Brad. The government wont ALLOW him to make "enough" to do so.
Does it matter that I never saw my dad as a kid because he was off working his ass off? Does it matter that my mom doesnt get to see him until 8 at night, almost every day? Does it matter that he's trying to put 4 children through college?
Apparently not.

...
Yes..and no:). Many conservatives have this view and many democrats upon hearing this view, react in the same way a Republican would to pro late-term abortion comments. In general though, this is not an uncommon conservative opinion. Republicans politically, tend to look at a social issue and narrow down to individuals as the problem. So in this case poor people are poor because they are lazy. It is their fault they are poor. Democrats on the other hand, tend see the problem as a product of the environment it lives in. In this case people are poor because the "system" did not give them an opportunity to succeed. They were born into an environment where the worst K-12 schools in the country, educationally crippled them in a way that they could not pull themselves out of poverty. From this you could say Republicans are interiorists and Democrats are exteriorists.

In many Republican policies this contrast exists. In gun control, the conservative instinct is that there should be less of it. Individuals should ensure gun safety is practiced. Fundamentally, everyone should be able to have a gun. Democrats believe the opposite. They believe 'system' must keep people from hurting others. With capital punishment. interiorists believe that the death penalty will curb murder by 'fixing' people who commit murder so they can never kill again. Their execution will then serve to fix other potential murderers by warning them of the ultimate consequence. Democrats believe that capital punishment doesn't work to curb crime, and fundamentally the system unfairly applies it by being influenced by money and race.

This is the basic argument of red versus blue. There is a counter argument that that Democrats and Republicans also have to ask themselves. What if our positions are wrong? In regards to the death penalty, Democratically, you might end up with more crime, but by putting more police on the streets we might compensate for it. Conservatively, we just killed an innocent man. How do you compensate for the death of the wrongly accused? In regards to the poor being lazy, if the democrats are wrong with Obamas tax plan, some money is moved from the wealthy to the poor. The poor will most definitely spend it back into the system (they are poor, they have to spend it to survive). This will boost the economy through inevitable spending and eventually trickle the money back up to the wealthy. If the democrats are right, then the next generation of low opportunity children will have the skills to create opportunity for themselves and in turn, the countries GDP(Gross Domestic Product. In simple terms this is the aggregate wealth produced by a country yearly.) will benefit vastly from a more efficient and more intelligent labor force. Warren Buffett, the 3rd richest man in the world and arguably the most successful investor in history, is an avid Obama supporter.

Personally, I am for creating opportunities for the poor, particularly educational. And no one can really be for creating handouts for the lazy except maybe the lazy. But the lazy are by definition lazy so they probably won't bother going out to vote :). I am also against gun control, and against the death penalty.

As for a complete redistribution of the wealth and Obama being socialist, every tax change is a redistribution of the wealth. The $250,000 your dad would be paying in January is actually the exact same tax level he would have been paying in 2000 at the end of the Clinton Administration. Obama is simply repealing the Bush Tax Cuts for those making more than $250,000. Consider the statement Colin Powell made recently:

Colin Powell
"Taxes are always a redistribution of money. Most of the taxes that are redistributed, go back to those that pay them, in roads, in airports, hospitals, schools"

 

Also Obama accounts for retirees in his plan as well, assuming a modest standard of living. His plan will eliminates taxes entirely for those over 65 and making less than $50,000 a year.

What you refer to as "welfare" are actually 'refundable' tax credits. These are tax credits that can be redeemed even if you have no income-tax liability. "No income-tax liability" does mean unemployed, but it also means poor and middle class and in some credits the rich. Obama tax credits, unlike welfare, are not incentives to live off the system. Credits that could qualify as the like the 'Make Work Pay' credit, require you to be a worker and don't disappear at low levels, dis-incentizing moving into a hire taxing bracket. These tax credits cover many different things including making college tuition more affordable, addressing housing crisis problems through mortgage interest reduction, encouraging savings through a matching tax credit of 50% up to $1000, and a 'make work pay' tax credit.

You should also be interested in knowing Obama isn't alone when it comes to refundable tax credits. John McCains health plan is explicitly that. It says so right on his site.

McCain-Palin Web site: John McCain Will Reform The Tax Code . . .
[E]very family will receive a direct refundable tax credit - effectively cash - of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families to offset the cost of insurance.

Knowing this, is John McCain also an advocate of welfare and socialism?

Mmm nutritious oils...

One particularly innovative tax credit Obama would be offering, is his savings incentive tax credit. This is really and truly the 'save the economy' tax credit. Our country's banks practice something called "fractional-reserve-banking" which means that for every dollar they have deposited in their vault they can loan out many times that. So for example Bank of America currently has a leverage ratio of 11. This means that if they have a $100 in reserve (a deposit or other liquid asset), they can are loaning out $1100. With more money in the banks reserves, more money is available to loan, and thus businesses are expanded with this newly available money supply. With our current economic crisis, it turns out that some banks have been using bad mortgages as an asset for reserves (I'm not implying Bank of America is in any sort of trouble). Every time, these assets degrade, they are less able to lend because they have to maintain their leverage ratio. One hundred dollars leaving the bank is $1100 dollars in loans also unavailble to the bank. Additionally as this economy continues to degrade, depositors begin to fear that loan defaults may overtake reserves and that the next time they go in to make a withdrawal there may not be money to withdraw. So people begin removing their deposits from the bank, and ironically the fear that the bank will collapse, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What Obama's tax credit does is give people an incentive to put more money into the bank. This will stabilize bank reserves. Stable bank reserves mean that the government can put a hold on nationalizing banks and some of that $700 Billion dollar bailout in tax payer's money can go back to taxpayers for spending. For each fully realized savings credit, and at a leverage ratio of 11, bank lending can increase $22,000. This is money for car purchases, business investments, college loans and more.

So the question of does it matter that you never got to see your dad as a kid, and he didn't get home until 8 at night and hes struggling to put 4 kids through college, does it matter? The answer really is yes and no. It does matter, but it should also matter just as much for the others who work long hours, many with several jobs to make ends meet. There are lazy people out there but these are not them. These were never given a chance. They never see their families, and their kids don't go to college. Their kids after having gone through some of the worst schools in the country, have no skills, and get pulled back into the same no-opportunity cycle their parents were in years before.

And even if you don't see the ethics in providing opportunity to these people, economically it still makes sense to. The 'system' or rather a purely capitalist system's primary goal is to create current wealth from current infrastructure and then to expand current infrastructure (making it more efficient, do more things, or innovate better infrastructure) from current wealth. This is a cycle that continually grows the country's GDP. However as infrastructure gets larger and more technical, you need more skilled people to grow and work it. Right now U.S. companies can't get ahold of H1 visas fast enough to import talent from other countries to work on todays infrastructure. When we import talent, these are jobs that could have and should have gone to citizens and money paid to this talent in many cases gets exported back their origin countries. These jobs don't go to citizens because we have educationally crippled a large portion of this country's workforce. This hurts production in this country and raises the acquisition costs of finding quality employees. Better educating the people, locally who work and expand the country's infrastructure can literally multiply the GDP because these are permanent citezens who want to work and innovate but don't have the know how. With a larger GDP, goods become cheaper. There are more jobs. More money flows through the system. The poor become the middle class. Some of the middle class become the rich and some of the rich become the super rich. The 'system' is really failing them and the country at all levels.

• Obama
• McCain
• Republican
• Democrat
• taxes
• welfare
• socialism