There's not a particular lot of thought going into why I'm voting for Obama.
As time goes by, I think I'm increasingly agitated at the private sector's complete inability to handle anything outside of making a temporary huge profit. Couple that with my social stance of "Anything goes", I can't see me voting for a Republican again, until they either change their platform entirely, or come up with an incentivization program for infrastructure that actually looks like it might work out better than the government building something.
I don't much care for either party, but comparing contemporary republicans to contemporary democrats is like comparing apples that actively hate about 75% of my friends to oranges that are OK with lying to my face about being corporate shills. I'll take the liars over the people actively destroying the lives of my friends and family.
Furthermore, economic conservatism, I think, is either a dead idea, or an idea that neither Republican nor Democrat actually ascribes to.
I am for -profitability- of a nation. And the benefits of slashing taxes and lowering spending is.... not the way to economic prosperity, and this is a pretty open-and-shut case. It allows a select few percentage people at the very, very top live a somewhat more prosperous life while actively fucking over everyone else. These monied individuals might actually affect GDP so much that the -numbers- show a wealthier nation, but looking at the numbers to determine wealth is a really small part of the picture.
The key to being profitable is actually making investments. Infrastructure. I live in Michigan, and we pretty much always take the shortest term solution to a problem of infrastructure, and it frustrates the living crap out of me. So much of our state budget is tied up in building and rebuilding our road system, because we use cheap building materials and also salt the roads every single year at winter. Would it cost a lot more to invest in a more durable road? YES. But it would also free up money in future years to help with our Education sector, which is failing. Or our Police or Fire services, which are also failing. Or our state healthcare, which is already failed. People who currently claim to be fiscally conservative are completely short-sighted about the long-term implications of economic investment, and I simply cannot trust them anymore with my money.
Furthermore, along this argument, it's telling looking at what conservatives actually want to cut. PBS, NASA (not that dems are Pro-NASA), Welfare, FOOD STAMPS.... Cutting PBS and NASA are like deleting your computer's text files to free up space on your 500 GB hard drive. And Food Stamps being a debated issue in 2012 in the United States--- I would argue that that, alone. ALONE that is a reason to not vote for one of the two main parties. Food Stamps are THE single most efficient government expense we currently have. It's an extremely small amount of government spending, and it pays itself off either at near-complete levels, or more-than-complete levels year after year. That one of the two parties considers this something that can be cut, or at least DEBATED cutting to rile up their base is some combination of unfathomable stupidity and pants-shitting evilness that I honestly might consider not voting Republican for that issue alone.
There's also a distinct unawareness (and complete dishonesty) of how the deficit works and where it actually comes from. The majority (or possibly a plurality. It's definitely the largest percent) of the US debt is not owed to China, Canada, Britain, or whatever. It's owed to the United States of America. Specifically, private corporations that... honestly, maybe we should consider taxing more. Instead of saying "Gee, I'll pay you back", I'm actually fairly A-OK with the government saying "Fuck you. You need us to operate your business and we need the money you're using to pay extravagant salaries to your CEOS to operate our country. Either YOU take care of your workers, or WE WILL" And really, that's only if people absolutely have to see the deficit go down. It doesn't have to.
There are only a handful of countries in the WORLD that operate without a federal deficit. Most of these are Middle Eastern nations with an insanely high oil profitability and also insanely shitty public service spending. The three first world nations are South Korea, which arguably has the best infrastructure on the planet, showing that, YES, spending a shit ton of money to upgrade your technology might actually become profitable, Norway, which is one of the most socialist countries in the world, and Iceland, which just declared fucking bankruptcy, so
who the fuck knows if looking at a goddamn deficit can tell you anything.
To be somewhat back on point, infrastructure and investment are very important ideas to me, and while Obama has been disappointing at best on this subject, Mitt Romney is actively -bad-. He wants to cut programs that are efficient, take up little of our expenditure, or -both-. He supports lower taxation for the population in the areas of the very rich and of corporations, which is where we get the bulk of our actual income from. He has repeatedly talked about expanding the size and scope of our military, which is already oversized, already not properly built for the operations we use it for,
against the advice of our actual military leadership, who want
decreased big fuckin' boats and guns and troops and more
specialists, and it's also one of the least efficient government expenses we currently have. Mitt's personal track-record on infrastructure and wealth-creation is terribly, TERRIBLY bad. My friends in Massachusetts gave me insight into
this handy shit-sandwich.
So yeah. I'm gonna vote for Obama. I'm not too thrilled with what kind of a president he's been, but Mitt could goddamn actually win this election, particularly if debates keep going the way they have been, and that would be an unmitigated disaster. I'd otherwise vote third party, but I'm not sure for whom. Republicans are supposedly the party of financial stability, but I've tried my best to show why that's laughable in the light of the contemporary GOP's rhetoric. You have a guaranteed human right to -vote- for your president in this country, so I mean, feel free to vote Romney if you really want. Just keep in mind that on both social and economic policy, a vote cast in this direction is
Objectively Wrong.
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