Election Thoughts

So, the elections are coming up, and so I decided to write down some thoughts on some of the issues at hand. As anyone who has talked with me on this issues knows, I am not a big fan of either of the candidates. Interestingly, I can count on a single hand how many people I have personally met who actually are big fans of any candidate. This year more than in the past, it seems like you have to not only focus on what you like about someone, but what you dislike about someone else, put the two together, and make a decision. After much thinking and reading, I did this, and will be voting strongly against Senator Obama.

Some claim that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. I would suggest that if negative things are important, they should be said anyways. That said, this is, indeed, a very negative post. It is also not at all well written, and is not terribly insightful. I had been thinking about writing it for a while, and after I wrote it, it was not nearly as great as I had imagined. It is mostly my random rants. However, it is what I think.

Taxes, and implicitly, entitlements- For some of Obama's verbiage and thinking on taxes, see here . My belief is that taxes are currently too high, in most part, to fund things like social spending and expensive wars. While wars will be covered later, tax usage for social programs is one of my largest complaints against Obama. For me, taxes are levied in order for a government to fund its operations – to build infrastructure, educate its citizens, defend itself and so on. However, increasingly, taxes are becoming a tool for income redistribution, taking money from those who make the most, and giving it to those who make the least. More than one third of Americans currently pay NO federal income tax. This number would increase to just below 50 percent if Obama got his way. What this means, in essence, is that about half of the people in the US would be using public goods and paying nothing for them. While many of these people certainly have some good reason they are not making more money and paying taxes, many of them simply do not.

Obama's tax plan centers around decreasing taxes for 95% of Americans. Whenever he says this, it makes me cringe. This is a blatant LIE. Many of the people whose "taxes" would be decreased pay nothing anyways, and will just be getting a larger refundable credit check at the end of the year. Obama wants to turn the IRS into the largest welfare agency the government has. While many are fine with that and in their compassion, would be happy to fund those on the dole, I am not.

Obama himself has discussed this, and says that he wants to "spread the wealth around", and that providing for those who are less fortunate is "neighborliness." I support helping those in need. I do not support the government forcing people to support those who do not support themselves. I have an acquaintance who believes the same, and while she has qualified for welfare and Medicare and food stamps for the last 3 years, and WIC for the last year, she has not used it. I admire her for that. Obama has suggested that to give such handouts to low income people will help them out on their way to wealth (as in the famous conversation to with Joe). This is ridiculous. If neo-classical microeconomics teaches us anything, if you decrease the cost of being poor, there will be more demand for poorness. Using verbiage like "fair", "spreading the wealth around" and "neighborliness" in the context of taxation is very unappealing to me.

CEOs: For Obama, the term CEO is synonymous with evil. That is divisive, classist, and a way to gain votes from people who have no idea what the term even means or entails. Further, when he vilifies people like "hedge fund managers", I sometimes wonder, if pressed, if he even knows what a hedge fund is. This type of rhetoric puts the have-nots against the haves, and makes them less likely to have and more likely to have a disdain for success.

The economy Recently, one of Obama's big pushes is to convince people that McCain will handle the economy the same way that Bush has, and that along with that, it is Bush's fault we are having the economic problem we are. This is ridiculous. The president has very little, if nothing, to do with where we are right now. A common misperception is that the president has some magical ability to make things happen, pass laws, fight crime, and so on. This is, to a large extent, false. While the reasons for the downturn are many and not well understood by anyone (indeed, if we understood fully what was going on, we would be much closer to figuring out what to do about it). It is complicated. There are, however, a couple factors that played into it that are simple.

The largest of which is that people are greedy. In the 90's, laws were passed that forced lenders to lend more freely to parties who had traditionally found it difficult to find credit (i.e., the poor), and as a result, increase the risk implicit in the loans. These lenders were overly aggressive in their lending, housing prices soared, making the asset backing the loans overpriced, and people started defaulting on their loans. In some, people are greedy. If people paid what they promised to pay, there would be no problem. Dishonest home owners who spent more than they needed to on a house are partly to blame. Lenders who got overzealous and over lent are to blame. And now, everyone pays for it (well, with important exceptions. Some parties are gaining enormously from the downturn) .

On a side note, I find it very disheartening how McCain has recently started saying the same kinds of things everyone is saying, that homeowners in default have been innocent bystanders. It is unfortunate, and for many of them not their fault, but for many, it is their fault.

The war- Obama has made this a huge issue, that he was against the war in the beginning. Recently, I have been very interested in war. I have listened to over 40 hours and watched over 14 hours about war, with all its bloody detail. It is terrible, and I hate war. However, concerning the war in Iraq, follow me in a thought experiment. In 2001, it was thought that Saddam Hussein may have had WMDs. There was intelligence, later discredited, that suggested he might. Let's assume that there was an x possibility that Hussein had WMDs, and that he intended to use them to kill thousands of people (something he had done without the help of WMDs, and which he was subsequently sentenced and killed for.) How high would x have to be before you invade Iraq and overthrow Hussein (who was engaged in other atrocities with a 100% probability)? What are the consequences of there being an incident, and you having not invaded? What are the consequences of invading, and finding no WMDs?

I think Zell Miller (D-Georgia), a US Senator, summed up my thinking very well in his speech about that war to the Senate: "A few weeks ago, we were doing some work on my back porch back home, tearing out a section of old stacked rocks, when all of a sudden I uncovered a nest of copperhead snakes. A copperhead will kill you. It could kill one of my dogs. It could kill one of my grandchildren. It could kill any of my four great grandchildren. They play all the time where I found these killers.

And you know, when I discovered these copperheads, I didn't call my wife Shirley and ask her advice, like I do on most things. I didn't yell for help from my neighbors or take it to the city council. I just took a hoe and knocked them in the head and killed them. Dead as a doorknob.

I guess you could call it a unilateral action. Or pre-emptive or even bellicose and reactive.

I took their poisonous heads off because they were a threat to me. And they were a threat to my home and my family. They were a threat to all I hold dear."

For me, any nonzero, positive probability X would have made me consider a war. What happened afterwards is another story. But the initial decision to invade is one that I think was not poorly made.

I find it interesting that now Obama is talking about how we need to put a lot more troops in Afghanistan, and so on. In the end, I don't think that there will be any less war with him, it will just be in a place that he picks, so that he can claim any victory that may or many not happen.

Experience – There was recently an opinion letter written by Karl Kling in the Ann Arbor News (not exactly a bastion of conservative thought) that summed this up perfectly in calling for the election of Liz Brater, Randy Richardville, or Cameron Brown in 2012 for President of the United States. Who are these people? State senators (in this case, from Michigan), exactly the position Obama held just 4 years ago. They would not be qualified to run the most complex, wealthy, and powerful organization on earth in four short years, and neither is Obama.

I remember I was in a political science class the day after the election, and my liberal teacher was in mourning. He was disappointed in the loss of Kerry. He put up an overhead saying "Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, 2008" How insightful that joke turned out to be. Liberals have been salivating over getting Obama on a presidential ticket since he made it on the scene 4 years ago, and not because of his experience.

Relationships – There has been a lot made of the different relationships Obama has had with different people, and I think this is something that should be considered. I don't think that Obama is planning to sell the US to anyone, or that he hates America. However, some of the associates he has kept make one wonder about his core philosophies, or about how he views the world. I saw online, but cannot now come up with the direct text, something that I found funny. It was entitled "Dispelling Myths about Barack Obama", and contained, among other things, the two following lines

1. Myth: Obama is a Muslim. Fact: Obama is a Christian, specifically, the whitey hating Afrocentric kind.
2. Myth: Obama bombed the Pentagon, and claimed he was sad he was not able to do more damage. Fact: False, that was Obama's friend.

Anyway, while not a pivotal question, it is something to think about. There will hopefully be updates on this later, as I attend Obama's former church in Chicago in the near future.

Historic Election: I thought this was an amazing article on why this is an "historic" election.

Education: Obama often talks about how hard it is to get a college education, and how expensive it is. He talks about how hard it is to file for federal aid, specifically how complicated the FAFSA is. My view is this: if you are not smart enough to fill out the FAFSA, or to find someone who is smart enough to help you, you should reconsider college. If you would not make enough upon graduation to repay student loans, maybe you should reconsider your degree. I think we have the best higher education system in the world, and anyone who is willing to work hard is able to succeed in it.

As far as other education, I think that the democratic party as a whole is far too beholden to teachers' unions to be helpful to education. Their idea of improving education is just to throw more money at it. I find it interesting that in the same line they say we need more money for education, they talk about how we are being educationally passed by other countries. We spend more per student on education that many, many countries have in GDP per capita. Something else is missing, namely, a sense of responsibility that I believe is being eroded by the feeling of entitlement and victimization that is pushed by the left.

Health care: I don't have a whole lot to say about health care. I think it is expensive because health care cost is a strictly convex function that has a slope almost equal to infinity as it increases. I also think that, given such expensive health care, it has to be allocated some way. Obama suggests it should not be allocated economically, but rather, by time, or something else non-monetary. I don't agree, although I have no idea how to allocate it. Deep inside of me, I tend to believe that in a situation of scarcity, there will simply be people who don't get the best health care money can buy. That seems pessimistic, but I think it is true. Who those people are is essentially the real political question. Do you disincentivize improving slightly medical care so that everyone can have the same, slightly lower level of care, or do you let things go free and allow the rich to buy more and more years in their life as health care gets better and better? I don't know. Here is an interesting article I recently read on it.

Social Issues: Social issues are very important to me. Specifically, abortion and gay marriage are important to me (as well as all sorts of other issues dealing with death and sex, but we will talk about these two). They are important from an ideological point of view. I do not think there will be any federal action taken on gay marriage, or that Roe v. Wade will be overturned (much to the dismay of Ms. Roe, who is currently anti-abortion, but still sketchy). The fact that liberals would suggest that up until 18 months ago, my wife had the "right" to end what was then Jacob disgusts me. Further, that Stacey currently has the "right" (in many states) to terminate the baby that is growing inside of her is also disheartening. In the end, regarding abortion, I have a hard time believing that liberals care about a woman's ability to choose as much as it just plain irritates them that there are sometimes consequences to having sex. Abortion merely seeks to eliminate those "consequences". Obama does not want such a "punishment" as a baby to exist.

Gay marriage, likewise, is a testy issue for me. I believe that homosexuality is wrong. I strategically chose the word wrong here, as it carries the least baggage of any negative term. I could have chosen the terms evil, immoral, a sin, unethical, bad and so on. Each of those carries certain connotations (that while true) dirty the argument. I will merely say wrong.

While there are many, many arguments people make about gay marriage (education in school, adoption, gay people's rights and so on), EVERY ONE of them starts from the premise that homosexuality is either right, or wrong. If it is not wrong, then there would be no problem that a book called "Sally has two Daddy's" is read in school.

So, in the end, there really is no effectual argument to made here. If homosexuality is wrong, then gay marriage should not be allowed. I believe it is wrong. I do not believe the relativist claims that it can be wrong for me, but that I should not impose my beliefs on others. If it is wrong, then it is wrong for everyone. I very much believe that some things are simply wrong, and wrong for everyone. Democrats, on the whole support gay marriage, but also support relativist claims about disinvolving any moral arguments in public policy. Obama gave what I actually consider a decent speech on this, which can be found here. Some of the parts of the speech are good, others are troubling. But, it does point out his views on the mixture of morality on these types of social issues.

Other stuff: There are many other issues to rant about. But, I won't. This is already too long, challenging only the post on Jacob's birth in length on this blog. So, I will end it.