The RIGHT Policy - Part 4 - Final Thoughts

In the previous articles in this series, I made it pretty clear that neither of the major party candidates offer much for a real conservative to vote for.  So what does that mean a conservative should do?  Here are the best options in my opinion:

1.  Vote for another candidate

I'm going to say on the front end that this is what I am going to do.  At the voting booth, my vote is likely going to Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party.  I suggest that you go to his site and look over his policies.  Clearly if I am voting for him, I must think he is RIGHT.  Chuck Baldwin seems like a really decent man and he seems to really understand what our founding fathers intended for our country when they formed out government.  He was a big Ron Paul supporter and Ron Paul has endorsed his candidacy.  Will he win?  Nope.  He probably won't even get 1% of all votes cast.  But I'm definitely not voting for Obama, and I can't vote for McCain so I'm going to vote for the candidate whose views match mine the most.  If you look over his site and views and decide that his religious views scare you, I have this to say to you:

-  Check your premises and read the statements of our founding fathers.

-  Consider Bob Barr of the Libertarian Party.  Libertarians don't inject their faith into their issues as much, but they are very conservative for the most part.  As I've said before, I consider myself very much a libertarian, so a vote there is a good one.

So now the obvious question is whether or not I am just throwing my vote away since I admitted above that likely less than 1% of the country will vote for any particular third-party candidate.  And here are my answers to that:

- I'm not throwing my vote away if I vote for the candidate I BELIEVE IN.

- In many ways, votes equal money for the candidate\party that gets the votes.  I want more money and recognition going to the views I support.

- If the Republican Party is supposed to be the party for conservatives and they have moved away from that platform, they do not deserve our vote.  The only way we are going to move them back to the RIGHT is to make them afraid that their jobs are in jeopardy if they don't

2.  Vote for McCain out of fear

That is, fear that the Democrats will control the legislative and executive branch.  And fear that their advantage in the Senate could reach the filibuster-proof level of 60 votes.  And that they will work toward control of the judicial branch through executive appointments and legislative approvals.

I admit, this is a legitimate fear.  Obama is definitely has socialist tendencies.  I don't buy into all of the fear that is being spread around about him but he will push policies that will make our government bigger.  And a Democrat Congress probably won't fight it too much.

Still, we need to remember this.  The new Congress will only have 2 years before the next Congressional elections.  At which point all of the House candidates and many Senators will be chosen.  If the Democrats start doing things that are totally crazy, then they will be voted out.  They know this so they will practice at least some restraint.  And Obama may practice some restraint also since he'll have to think about re-election in 2012.  The Republicans had a pretty big advantage during the first six years of Bush's presidency and they were nothing close to conservative.  I have no doubt that a full Democrat advantage will be very similar.  Nothing too far left.  A lot of compromises.  And a very angered base.

So lets say Obama wins and the scenario I mention above happens over the next two years.  We'd have a Democrat Congress that isn't doing what their constituents want them to do and an already angered Conservative\Republican base.  Which means that we have a great chance at major changes to Congress in just two years.  Liberals likely will not put up challengers to the Democrats, and they may be angry enough not to vote (just like conservatives did two years ago and likely will do again this year).  But REAL conservative candidates will start to surface.  And they will take seats away from the Democrats.  They may even challenge the Republicans and win, thus making the party more conservative.

 

So yes, full Democrat control for even a short while is scary, but I'm willing to take that risk out of the hope that our country will reject them handily in a couple of years.  Also, I know I've said this a lot but I have to remind you of this once again - John McCain IS NOT A CONSERVATIVE.  A vote for McCain is really just a vote against Obama.  What makes you think McCain's legislation will be any different than Obama's?  And what makes you think voting for McCain will move the country to the RIGHT?  Why would the Republicans learn any lessons if we keep giving them power?

Finally, I want to make one last argument for voting third party.  This is something that I read in an email and I think it is very valid.  I live in Mississippi.  The handful of readers of this blog either live in Mississippi, Tennessee, or Arkansas.  Take a look at this map.  All of our states are voting for McCain.  If you want McCain to win out of fear of what Obama will do, then you are ok.  But you have a chance to make a strong statement.  Every vote for a Chuck Baldwin and Bob Barr is a vote against Republicans.  Every vote is a REJECTION of where the Republican Party is headed.  Make them take notice.  Make them reflect.  Make them scared.

A nice break

Last night, McCain and Obama gave some really funny speeches at a charity dinner.  Well worth a watch if you have time.

Here is John McCain's speech

And here is Barack Obama's

The RIGHT Policy - Part 3 - Economy

It's been over a month since my last entry in this series.  Wow, a lot of stuff has happened in politics since then huh.  And most of it has been related to the economy.  I wish I would have had time to put more thoughts down but things have just been too busy.

The economy is really the issue that brings everything together, which is why it's the last main policy item I wanted to deal with.

I'll start by breaking up economic policy into a few categories.

Taxes

All of a sudden Republicans and Democrats want to cut taxes.  That is something I should consider a success, right?  Well, maybe if they would CUT SPENDING it would be a success.  Now they basically want to buy votes by claiming they will cut taxes.

Here's the facts - your taxes are going to go up.  And very soon.  Regardless of who is elected president in a few weeks.  The Bush tax cuts are about to expire and Congress is absolutely not going to put anything worthwhile in their place right now.  Our national debt is way too big.  We may get some stimulus checks (as I said, buying votes) but I'd be really surprised if anyone got a real tax cut.

We can't cut taxes and go crazy with spending at the same time.  It's a formula for disaster as we are seeing right now.  Bush got the tax cut part right, but not the spending.  Obama and McCain will do the same.

I'll touch briefly on what the RIGHT tax policy would be.  I'd be ok with a fair tax (sales tax).  I'd be more ok with no income tax at all.  Think about this - Ron Paul said we could do that if we could cut our government spending down to 2001 levels.  What would we have to cut to get to that?  Well, a significantly reduced military presence in foreign countries would take care of most of it.  But we'd also have to cut\eliminate spending in some of these other areas also.

Entitlements

These are things like Medicare, Social Security, Education, etc, etc.  Not really hearing anyone talking about doing anything but making these larger, huh?  Yep, no real conservative choice here either.

The biggest things you'll hear about these are, "we have to take care of the children" and, "we have to take care of the elderly".  That's code for "we have to take your money and give it to someone else".  Which might be ok to most people if it didn't include, "but first we have to run it through some huge crazy government bureaucracy."

So how to deal with these?  I'd love to say we could cut the vast majority out entirely but that ain't ever going to happen.  I do think people younger than 35-40 should be able to opt out of Social Security if we want.  So something close to what Bush had proposed a few years ago.

As for Medicare and Education, I think the less direct Federal involvement the better.  The key to these is to have them as close to the individual level as possible, and folks making policy in Washington are no where close to that.  I think we could significantly improve our health care and education situation if the federal government were largely out of it.  I've said before that I think that Medical care could be handled much better if it were in the non-profit\religious sector.  I continue to believe that, as it gets even closer to the individual that way.

Overall, the first thing we need to realize is that throwing more money at these programs is not going to make them better.  If you have bad management or too much red tape, all the money in the world won't help.

"Pork Barrel" Spending

Or, more accurately - how our bills are packaged.  It is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE for our legislative bills to be filled with crap that is in no way related to the intent of the original bill.  We need bills where everything in them has a certain theme, and where every individual item gets a real vote.  So yes, if 50 Senators add something different to a bill, all 50 items should get voted on.  It's the only way to hold our Congress accountable for what goes into a bill, it's a great way to KNOW WHAT IS IN A BILL, and it's a great way to deal with corruption.  John McCain has been horrible during his campaign of saying that Obama voted for this or against that.  When the reality is that all of their votes can be said to be for or against anything.  It's simply misleading to say a person is against tax cuts when he votes no on an energy bill that includes a tax cut for some crazy unrelated thing.  Make the bills simpler and with a consistent theme.

Foreign Policy

As I mentioned above, if we would cut out some of the situations we are in outside of our country, we would be much better here.  We could do things with our military personnel like strengthen our borders (which would not only protect us from our enemies but would also create more jobs here for our own citizens).  We could also move some of the money that is going to our military to things like producing our own energy, which will make us more money and (again) create more jobs.  We've been focusing way too much on other countries when we have serious problems here.  We need to get our priorities RIGHT.  If the American people want to send aid to other countries, we should send it on our own.  The government does not have to steal from us to do it.

 

Ok, so as you can see and as I stated above, our economic policy really is what brings all of the other issues together.  I didn't mention social issues, but that's an easy one to correlate.  Our tax code affects things like gay marriage because of insurance deductions, tax structures for married people, etc, etc.  And the government has no business spending money on things like abortions and stem-cell research.  My social issues article dealt with these directly.

To summarize, this is really the overall theme for the way I see things.  The federal government is WAY too big.  It was originally intended to provide guidelines for the individual states and provide backup where necessary.  It's turned into an entity that basically is controlling everything we do.  This cannot continue.  There is no way that a few people in Washington can know how best to govern 300 million people.

It's pretty clear that our country is not headed in the RIGHT direction.  The next and final thing I'd like to discuss in this series is some of my thoughts on what the future probably holds and how I think we can turn things around.  More soon...

Monday Thoughts

A couple of things on my mind this morning...

Football

Wow, what a crazy football year it's been already, in both College and the NFL.  It seems any team is beatable on any given day.  I'm sure y'all know what\who I want to talk about though - the Giants!  Wow, what a whoopin' they put on the Seahawks yesterday!  Even with out their "star receiver", they put points on the board just about every time they touched the ball.  Eli is looking so much like Peyton did in years past.  Spreading the ball around, making play changes at the line, throwing the ball where it needs to be thrown.  The Giants really are looking good right now.  Still a long way to go of course, but what a great start.

JT's choice

On Saturday, JT wrote that he had decided that he could not vote for John McCain after McCain voted for the bailout.  And he mentioned a lot of the things I wrote about in my last blog post.  And at the end, he said he'd be writing in a vote for Ron Paul.  This is something that I've thought about quite a bit.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do just yet, but I am getting to the point that I can't see my self voting for John McCain either.  And I want to take this opportunity to urge each of you to follow your convictions in this matter.  It's not about "pinching your nose" and voting for the lesser of two evils.  it's not about voting against one particular candidate.  It's about voting for the person YOU BELIEVE IN.  Even if that means you have to write that person in.  So JT, thanks for leading by example here.  You won't regret it.

More on the bailout

Well, the House of Representatives just passed the bailout.  President Bush will likely sign it in a few hours.  Sad, but not surprising.

I do have one thing to bring up that no one is really talking about though - John McCain is practically basing his entire economic policy on cutting "pork-barrel spending".  Excuse me, not cutting...ELIMINATING.  As a matter of fact he's said he will veto any bill with pork in it and he'll make the people who put it in there famous.

Well, Senator McCain, what about the bailout bill that YOU VOTED "YES" ON YESTERDAY??!!!  What about all the pork in that bill that caused it to go from $700 billion to $850 billion??!!!  What about the following items - do they count as "pork"?!!

A $2 million tax benefit for makers of wooden arrows for children; a $100 million tax break to benefit auto racetrack owners; $192 million in rebates on excise taxes for the Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands rum industry; $148 million in tax relief for U.S. wool fabric producers; and a $49 million tax benefit for fishermen and other plaintiffs who sued over the 1989 tanker Exxon Valdez spill.

What about all of this, Mr McCain?  Why didn't you vote against it, why didn't you "name names"??!!!

How can we trust you are going to cleanup Washington if you don't even practice what you preach in the first high-profile chance you've had to do so???!!!!

If you can't tell already, this really burns me up.  How did our political process get so corrupted?