Once again I have decided to not vote for the Republican nominee or the Democrat nominee for President. There are a myriad of reasons, but I will state my main reasons.

In the 2008 Presidential election, I believe that we have been victimized by polarization, and with either choice we end up with policies that use taxpayer dollars and increased debt and higher deficits, either for favoring the rich while suppressing the disadvantaged, or for favoring the poor by suppressing the rich. Either way we end up with more debt.

I decided to not vote for John McCain and Barrack Obama on the day that they both voted in favor of using $700 billion dollars to let Hank Paulson give taxpayer money to banks and insurance companies and Wall Street. The interest alone that the taxpayers will have to be burdened with to pay for the money that will be borrowed from China and Russia for this handout for the biggest crooks of our time, will add up to enough money to pay for basic health care for American citizens who are below the poverty line in our country.

The fact is that the health care plans of John McCain, Barrack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Hilary Clinton are unworkable because they are designed to make insurance companies richer. It is okay if insurance companies get richer, but not because of government policies that force individuals and companies to pay them a big fat cover charge. Basic life-and-death health care needs to be available to everyone, the same way that fire departments and police departments and paramedic services are available for everyone, with the expectation that people who are using these services need to be in the United States legally, and if they are not here legally, they need to leave. Middle class workers who are working for businesses that do not have health insurance, and small business owners and self-employed contractors who are struggling to put gas in the car and food on the table, should not have to file bankruptcy and have their lives ruined because they have a stroke or break their leg. That is IMMORAL in the wealthiest country in the world. Shame on people who try to call that socialism or communism.

Both John McCain and Barrack Obama (along with George W. Bush) are weak on illegal immigration. I agree that we should have a stern strict policy that makes it possible (and costly) for some people who are here illegally to become legal taxpayers, because they are here because of bad government policies in the past, but it is useless and in vain if we don't secure all the borders and put in place and actively enforce policies that keep illegal immigrants from getting into the country and setting up camp and taking away jobs from legal taxpaying citizens. George Bush invited Mexicans to come on over because he said that everybody who wants to work in this country and do "jobs that Americans don't want" should be able to do so.

Barrack Obama supported the handgun ban in Washington DC. When his anti-gun V.P. choice was announced, Barrack Obama and Joe Biden stood beside each other and criticized the fact that John McCain owns several homes. When a Presidential candidate thinks it is bad for individuals to own homes and be rich, and he wants to take away handguns from law-abiding citizens, I get worried, especially when his biggest campaign slogan is "we need change". Read your history books, kids, and be very cautious.

John McCain supports the spending of a trillion dollars in a war that shouldn't have been waged in the first place. Every thing that we have done in Iraq could have been done with 25% of the money if it wasn't for the padding of every cost for the sake of Blackwater and Haliburton and other friends of the Bushes. John McCain now says that we need to make the George W. Bush handouts for the rich permanent, which he voted against, because they were tax cuts that he used to say "unfairly favor the rich". With tax cuts that favor the rich and trillion dollar wars and trillion dollar bailouts for Wall Street, John McCain wants to lead us into more debt. It is ludicrous to disagree with the policies of George W. Bush and then support McCain. Every Republican politician in the country is distancing themselves from Bush, even they supported him and voted for him. Will you believe that they are different? Have you ever heard the saying that "fool me once...".

I voted for Reagan twice because he said that we needed to balance the budget and reduce the debt "for the sake of our kids and their kids". Then he gave the biggest tax cuts for the richest people in the world in history while cutting out programs to help the sick and elderly, and then took out the United States American Express Card and kept charging until the economy looked good, and left office with the most humungous deficits and debts in history until then, but is nothing compared to the debts and deficits racked up during 12 years of Bushes.

I voted for Clinton twice (and I would vote for him now, if he could run) because he said he was going to balance the budget and reduce our debt, and he did it. All the lying crooked talk show hosts and lower-taxes-for-billionaires advocates were saying when Bill Clinton got into office and raised taxes for the rich that the economy was going to be horrible and unemployment was going to go up and small businesses would suffer, but just the opposite happened. For 90% of Americans, the Bill Clinton years were the best economic times during the past 60 years, and unemployment was the lowest in my lifetime. Bill Clinton's tax hike was nothing compared to the amount of the disastrous tax cut for the richest people that Reagan gave. Tax cuts that are designed to give 90% of the tax cut money to people making over a million dollars a year do not stimulate anything but the elimination of the middle class, and puts the average worker out of reach of being financially successful and financially secure. Giving millions of dollars a year each to the likes of Britney Spears, Jim Carrey, Tiger Woods, Oprah, movie stars, rap stars, porn stars, owners of strip clubs and casinos and Hollywood studios, is not going to help anybody get a job or be able to make enough money to get ahead. I am in favor of having low unemployment and a balanced budget and no wars and paying down the debt, and that is what we had with Bill Clinton. Nobody is going to lay off employees because of taxes.

Rich people who have to pay more taxes don't stop hiring or buying equipment. In fact, they do just the opposite. They need to hire more people and buy more equipment and do more advertising so that they can make more money to make up for paying more taxes, and they have the money to do it. They pay more money to CPAs to figure out how to invest their money to avoid taxes, and that benefits the markets. They decide that instead of paying more taxes they will put the money into their businesses and make them better and more efficient and more productive. Unemployment then goes down, and the average worker has a good work environment, consumers have paychecks and raises and money to spend on goods, which results in higher sales and profits for companies that make and sell these goods. That results in more tax revenues from everyone. The lying crooked talk show hosts and regulars on Fox are trying to say that is Socialism and Communism. Bill Gates made billions during the Clinton years selling software to consumers, and he would have made much less if the consumers were broke and could not afford to buy anything, like now. Billionaires that own businesses that sell services and goods to common people thrive in a Bill Clinton economy.

The truth is that there is a handful of people who have enough money to control a lot of media who have been trying to convince people that it is good for the country for everyone to just take all of their money and all the taxpayer money and put it into their money bags and trust them to make the world better for us, and then they say that if you disagree with them then you are a Communist. That routine has been going on way before I was born with McCarthyism and the likes of it. If they can't sway you to vote for them and their evil ways, and if you are not concerned about the economy and the good of the country, they hope you are against abortion so they convince you that they are too, even though all they want to do is to be in charge so that the money gets stuffed into their bags for their getaway. We have had Republicans in charge of the Supreme Court during the past few decades and abortion is legal all over the country, so if you are suckered into voting for Republicans because you think they are going to make abortion illegal, then you have been duped for the sake of those rich guys with the masks on that are trying to get everybody to put all the money into their bags because they say that they are the "moral choice".

I am 100% against abortion and I hate abortion. But I am not convinced that making it illegal solves anything, and would create new illegal black markets and gangs and new government costs, and tie up courts and jails, and there would be just as many, if not more, abortions in this country. I believe most Republican politicians agree with me in practice, but they use the abortion issue to get more votes and money into the pockets of the few people who control their party, because they have to have something to convince poor people to vote for them and support their policies that hurt poor people and unjustly use taxpayer money to help themselves.

Barrack Obama is no FDR or JFK or Bill Clinton. John McCain is just another Bush. And I am not going to vote for either of them.

by Phil Staudt
September 25, 2008
The Phil Staudt Blog

      Tags: McCain Obama