Why Obama, Part 2: A Brief-as-Possible Look at Taxes

I thought about heading into the territory of “change,” since both candidates have decided to make the word their mantra this election, but since everybody always talks about Obama and change, I think I’ll talk about taxes and fiscal responsibility instead.

[EDIT: If you want an even clearer comparison of McCain’s and Obama’s claims to fiscal responsibility, read this article: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/09/04/2008-09-04_forget_the_pork_wheres_the_beef.html .  Frankly, this article says it better than I ever could, and I think you should read it.]

            It is the view of the Republican Party that the government should let more people keep more of their own money, should spend less money itself, and should keep a tightly balanced federal budget.  It seems to be a tightly guarded secret that, for the most part, Democrats actually agree with all of these tenets.  Yes, Democrats tend to support new social programs that do cost money, and are less averse to raising taxes than Republicans, but Democrats aren’t here to steal away your hard-earned house to turn it into a bathhouse for the homeless.  And while Democrats tend to spend more on things at home, they tend to spend considerably less on things like the military.  And, you know, wars against nations that weren’t threatening us.

            Listen to a few facts, take a look at a few numbers, and re-assess what you think.  Neither Obama nor McCain plans to raise taxes for the middle class – anybody below the $250,000/year mark.  In fact, both McCain and Obama plan to cut taxes for people up to that mark.  After that, their plans diverge: McCain’s tax cuts extend all the way to the top, while Obama plans to simply return the tax levels of the top 10% to just below where they were during the Clinton years.  McCain’s tax plan results in a very clear and very direct loss of income for the government – that is, less money to fund the government’s most necessary functions.  (Actually, of course, all of this money is hypothetical – we won’t actually run out of it, we’ll simply run ourselves further in debt to countries like China, whose ties to us are purely opportunistic.)

The theory is that the low taxes will encourage so much growth and trade and revenue that they will pay for themselves.  While I admit that this is quite reasonable, I am forced to say that I am unconvinced by its results in the past twenty years.  Our Federal Budget deficit ballooned during the 80s as our economy grew and stabilized with low taxes, and in the 90s, under higher tax rates, our economy grew by leaps and bounds.  In fact, those higher taxes left us with a budget surplus, long since evaporated after falling into the hands of a president whom no one, Democrat or Republican, calls a fiscal steward.

A philosophical disagreement with taxes is something worth talking about another time, but let’s stop to look at what we’ve got here: moderate increases in taxes don’t destroy the economy, and they can provide our country with a balanced budget and economic freedom.

Now, back to some numbers: the way McCain’s plan is structured heavily favors the wealthy.  That’s not an accusation, it’s number sense (click this link to see just how much: http://nearing.newsvine.com/_news/2008/08/28/1797267-mccains-tax-cuts-are-aimed-at-the-rich-even-more-so-than-bushs-were ).  The average middle-class family, under McCain’s tax cuts, can hope to save some $325 a year, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (a non-partisan group).  If you’re voting to put more cash in your wallet, take a look at this: the same family, under Obama’s plan, can hope to save about $1,120 a year - $795 more than with McCain. [http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/a_new_stitch_in_a_bad_pattern.html ] With Obama, 85-90% of the public is getting a tax cut.  Are the wealthy stuck with the tab?  Well, somewhat – as mentioned before, their taxes go back to just below the Clinton tax levels.  But while their tax levels return to 90s levels, their actual income levels have multiplied since that time by at least five-fold.  They won’t be forced to shut down their factories just yet.

But how does it pan out on a national level?  Where do these cuts and raises leave our national budget?  McCain’s cuts are expected to increase our debt by as much as 4.5 trillion dollars, while Obama’s are expected to increase it by 3.3 trillion dollars.  Those numbers look pretty similar in type, but think about the actual difference between 4,500,000,000,000 and 3,300,000,000,000.  It’s staggering. [http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates_taxproposals_tpc/index.htm?cnn=yes]

Here are some other things to chew on: McCain and Palin are running on a platform to cut pork-barrel projects and dastardly earmarks.  More power to them – if the projects are worth spending money on, they should go through the whole process that everything else does.  But cutting pork-barrels and earmarks does not add up to a plan to balance the budget.  Do you know how much money is spent on pork-barrel projects?  In 2004, it was less than 53 billion dollars.  Even if you could eliminate all of that – which, of course, you couldn’t – it would barely put a dent in government spending (we were just looking at numbers in the trillions!).  By comparison, our government now spends more than $700 billion a year on military expenses alone.  Even as recently as 2002 that number was just about $350 billion dollars. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/01/27/GR2006012700168.html

(If you want to see some really interesting – and scary – charts about military spending, click here: http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending)

Just so you know I haven’t left reality behind me, I’m going to admit that neither candidate is going to balance the budget.  It’s not gonna happen.  But it is valid to ask which of the two will leave us in a better position at the end of his term, especially when one of them wants to focus so much on the government’s budget habits.

McCain knew that the Bush tax plans were bogus back when they were first being pushed through.  He voted against them, and he was vocal about it.  Whether Adam Smith has chosen to haunt McCain’s dreams ever since, or whether McCain has chosen to make another considerable concession to his conservative base (as he did with Palin…more on her some other time…when I’ve got a lot more time on my hands…), I cannot say.  But the fact that he now not only supports them, but wants to extend them further, confuses me.  And it saddens me.  Because he’s never given a good explanation for why he switched on this issue, and I’m not sure that he can. (See also: environment, global warming, off-shore drilling, straight talk).

Why Obama, Pt. 1: The Beginning of Something Long

I've been thinking through some of these things for months, and I wanted to voice them. If they spin out unheard into the void, I don't mind - some of this is just a chance for me to organize my thoughts. They need organizing, because I'm quite given to incoherent babbling when it comes to politics, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm going to try to avoid willfully subjecting my friends to this.

Essentially, my thought is this: whether you are a Republican, Democrat, liberal, centrist, or moderate conservative, I think the case for Obama can be made very compellingly. I'm going to take a crack at it. I don't think any solid conservatives will go for it, but I'd still like them to listen in anyway. While I don't plan to hide my views, I hope to state them in a way that avoids the simple habit of bashing the other party for kicks, slandering people, making unfair accusations, or making straw-men arguments from the opposing view. I respect the conservative Republican approach to things, and I respect people who maintain that approach. But let me tell you why I shifted away from it.

Introduction:
I’ve been vaguely interested in politics for much of my life. When I was younger, I believe my motivation was chiefly that the ability to talk politics seemed to make me sound smarter, more adult. I probably still hope it does these things, but this hope is entirely secondary to my growing fascination of the pure mechanics of it all. In the last two years, politics has become a hobby of mine that consumes a surprising amount of my time, as I spend hours combing through the New York Times, the BBC World News, and sites like www.politico.com.
I might as well tell you now that in 2004, I voted for Bush. I did not know Kerry very well, I didn’t like his voice, and he sounded very suspicious to me. I was not entirely sure that I liked Bush, but at the time I was more concerned that any Supreme Court openings be filled by more conservative judges. As it happened, two openings came up, and Bush appointed Roberts and Alito (aside from his rulings in favor of expanding executive powers, I think I like Roberts. I don’t really know about Alito yet.)
Around 2006, I began to grow very excited about the 2008 elections. Interesting things had been happening. John McCain had been finding his way into the press again, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else getting the Republican nomination in ’08 – which was great, because I loved McCain. I even got to see him speak in person, and he conveyed a message that deeply resonated with me: the needs of America ought to come above the petty squabbles between parties. This same year, Democrats had chased Sen. Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party because he wasn’t against the war – never mind the fact that he had always been a successful, popular, well-loved and well-respected senator. But he, too, rose above: he ran as an Independent, and won his seat back handily.
I began thinking that my dream ticket for 2008 would be McCain/Lieberman (when people actually began to consider this a possibility in recent weeks, nobody believed me when I tried to say I predicted it years ago. This may be why I’m writing my thoughts now, just in case I get the chance to say, years later, “I told you so.”) Both of these men were well-respected, ethically sound men who could – and frequently did – work together to get things done. McCain broke with his party to pursue responsible care for the environment, and Lieberman broke with his to support things like the troop surge in Iraq, among other things. These two men could change the world.
And then, early in 2007, I stopped to watch a little video online. A good-looking young black man with a name I wasn’t sure I could pronounce gave a forty-five minute speech in his church about how faith ought to interact with politics – providing a compelling contrast to our current president’s approach, which has deeply troubled me. I wasn’t ready to let go of McCain, but I had to hear more from this man. Just as I knew that McCain had to be the Republican nominee, I knew that this man had to be the Democratic.

First Things:
I hope there is nobody out there who still thinks Obama is a Muslim. He’s not. (Insert obligatory “Not that it would matter…” here). And I think most people have put the flag-pin incident behind them (although, in truth, he was making a very apropos comment on patriotism). His wife’s “finally proud of this country” statement was nothing more than a mis-phrased gaffe (if you want to hear a gaffe, you should hear some of the things McCain has called his wife in public), and I haven’t heard anybody say anything about Jeremiah Wright in a while. I find this comforting, but I also haven’t been hanging around the people who would say something about these things, and so I imagine these non-issues haven’t completely died for everybody. Particularly Wright. I considered writing full-fledged responses to these ridiculous items, but I find that I can’t bring myself to do so: these topics are just not worth it. None of the above-mentioned topics is in the least bit important. At all. Seriously. I’m open to discussing these if somebody else wants to get me worked up about them, but honestly, I’d rather discuss more interesting things, like tax policies and health care.

I was wandering around the DNC last week with my roommate, enjoying the festive air and the bounty of crazy people doing bizarre, attention-grabbing activities, when I made what I admit is something of a crass joke. "Hey," I said. "Wouldn't it be funny if, every time I passed anyone who looked remotely ethnic, I ran up to them and shouted, 'Yes we can!'?"

The joke, of course, is that it would not be funny at all. It would be really embarrassing and offensive to assume that anybody with slightly different pigmentation in their skin would vote for Obama simply because he's black, no questions asked (Does anybody remember Alan Keyes? There's a reason you have to wikipedia him. He didn't win anything.). So why is it that everybody thinks it's perfectly acceptable to assume that women are going to turn out in droves to vote for a woman, simply because she's a woman?

I grew up in good old conservative Tennessee, and I swear I didn't hear a kind word about Hillary Clinton the whole time I was there. Even from women. I didn't even know people liked her until last year, when I was able to warm up to her a bit myself. The news talked incessently about her picking up the female vote (as though she was born with that vote in the bag), but you know, it all panned out pretty evenly. If she had gotten "the female vote" (as though they vote in bloc!), she would have handily won the nomination.

And now you have McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP, which I think was an incredibly shrewd choice (I just hope it wasn't shrewd enough to tilt things in his favor). I think it was shrewd for a number of reasons, but none of these reasons have to do with Palin picking up the mythical "female vote." Palin will appeal to, oh, I imagine about half of American women. Roughly the same amount as sympathize with her [incredibly] conservative views. She's excited conservatives, she's gotten endless news coverage since the announcement, she's generating much needed attention for the Republicans, but she didn't just sew up the election by virtue of her reproductive organs. Ok?

Oy. So anyway, I've decided that, since I feel far too guilty to actually subject my friends to endless inane political talk, I'm going to broadcast it into the great void of the web, where it will bounce around harmlessly and bore only those who wish to read it. Say, have I told you about the series of articles I'm planning to write...