Taxes: McCain vs Obama

Now, I wish I could state that I am completely unbiased and impartial when it comes to politics, but I just can't. Although I do think that both candidates, and more genereally all politicians, will implement poor policies that will undoubtedly have a negative impact on our economy and its prospects for growth, if someone were to point a gun to my head and say "CHOOSE!", I would vote for McCain. (Full disclosure: I have never voted before, nor am I likely to vote this coming November.)

That said, any prospective voter would be doing theirself an extreme disservice if they did not diligently investigate the specifics of each candidates policy proposals. Luckily, the folks at The Tax Foundation have already done much of the work pertaining to taxes for you! They have even produced it in nifty chart form. Ask yourself, which one will make the US a more attractive place to live and do business?

HT: CarpeDiem

A Confession

I have a confession to make. I have developed an unhealthy hatred for all things Barack Obama. Living in Ohio, I've been bombarded with campaign commercials. McCain on how wimpy and inexperienced Obama is, Obama on the need to develop alternative energy and reform healthcare, you the get the drift, standard campaign stuff. But the most recent commercial had to be designed to give me a brain hemorrhage. Though I tried to find a link to the video (and failed), the commercial is roughly a 30 sec clip featuring Obama telling us all how "Speculators are bad, evil people" and that as a solution to the energy crisis he plans to give everyone a $1000 check to cope with the high prices, and to pay for all this he will introduce a "windfall profits tax" as retribution against those greedy oil gougers. Big Oil? Come on!

Now, I want to ignore the headspinning lack of coherent logic employed by the Obama campaign economically. (If you need a few reasons why those policies can be described as moronic at best, follow the links: On Speculation Here, Here, and Here; on "windfall profits" here.) What I want to focus on is my reaction to these commercials. I think it's obvious that Obama is a savvy guy. The man was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He is not stupid! Obama, and the folks running his campaign, make these commercials because it is what they believe the public wishes to hear from their president. The name of the game is to get elected, and rarely is it that a candidate comes onto the scene as a true reformer and driver of an entirely new political paradigm. (Reagan is a glaring example of this.) This is how democracy functions, for better or worse.

I guess what I find most unfortunate and distressing about these commercials is that there is an actual electorate that is eating this up. Barack Obama is the current favorite to be our next president! So these are not marginal ideas but, arguably, mainstream. I remain optimistic for the future, though this optimism is being challenged with each passing day knowing so many of my peers are susceptible to being duped by such contradictory and harmful ideas.

Barack Obama's Plan to Save Social Security and Its Potential Ramifications

Senator Obama has proposed to extend the payroll tax on earned income to those making over $250,000 or more. Currently workers pay a percentage of their earned income to Social Security only up to $102,000. Anything earned beyond the first 102k is not subject to any Social Security taxes. The Cato Institute's Daniel Mitchell has a video posted on his blog where he discusses the plan and its likely effects on our economy and the prospects for future growth.




Obama is proposing a plan that will make the private sector $5 poorer for every $1 gained by The Government. If this is not indicative of one of the most terribly destructive and myopic policy proposals around, then I do not know what is.

Bummed Out

I've been in a melancholic mood the entire day. I woke up and, like I do every day, flipped on the television. I had apparently left the channel on MSNBC when I last turned the tv off, so I awoke to the speech this morning by Barack Obama on the current issues pertaining to our economy. Unfortunately Obama, like his Democrat counterpart Hillary Clinton, only argued for increasing what he termed "government oversight" to counteract "greed" along with various other populist talking points. Not only does he feel the need to disparage free trade (see the debate between he and Clinton at Cleveland State), a concept that no modern economist would dare argue to be an overall losing proposition and also a concept that was first popularized by David Ricardo nearly 200 years ago! Obama also feels that our economy would function more effectively with various government interventions, which would only be those which Obama and his cadre of policy makers deem appropriate. Ha! Surely it's not unreasonable to expect that, under the conditions without government distortion, people would be most capable of deciding what is best for them in their own respective transactions within the market. Surely one would not doubt the lessons of history, lessons that were cemented fairly recently with the falling of the Berlin wall and the unraveling of communism, which illustrate quite convincingly the failures of central planning and government micromanagement of an economy.

I'm sick of those who do not know of, nor have studied, the lessons of economics arguing against the free-market and all that the free-market system entails.