Steve Novick
Posted February 25, 2008
snip//
So why am I voting for Barack Obama?
I'm voting for Barack Obama largely because I wonder whether Hillary Clinton is willing to take the political risks she'd need to take to act on what she knows.
Let's look at the subject of tax policy. Hillary Clinton acknowledges that wealthy Americans used to pay staggeringly high tax rates. She knows that the activist government we used to have was funded by those taxes. But in this campaign, she has offered nothing bolder on the tax front than repealing Bush's tax cuts for the richest 1% - something we all know won't be enough to pay for the kind of investments we'll need in renewable energy, in health care for the uninisured, and for Medicare and Social Security when the baby boomers retire. In fact, she has viciously attacked Obama for suggesting -- as Peter DeFazio does, as John Edwards did, as I do -- that people who make over $1 million a year should pay Social Security taxes on all their income, rather than just the first $100,000.
Yes, I know there is a technical argument against lifting the cap. Technically, Social Security itself, if it were truly a self-contained system, would be in good shape for decades. But it's hard to see how the Federal government is going to repay what it has borrowed from Social Security. Since much of the borrowing from Social Security was for the purpose of giving tax cuts to the wealthy, asking the wealthy to pay Social Security taxes is a reasonable way to ensure that promised benefits are actually paid.
And anyway, Clinton didn't make a technical argument against Obama. She just screamed "trillion-dollar tax increase!" -- ignoring the fact that it would only affect people who make over $100,000, ignoring the huge obligations we have to fulfill.
And let's look at that troublesome subject of the war. I can't really excuse anyone for voting for the war. Even if you believed Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction," did you believe they would use them while U.N. weapons inspectors were on the ground? And if the idea was that we were supposed to invade any hostile country with weapons of mass destruction, why not invade North Korea first? Those are among the questions the Democrats should have asked George Bush, and they should have voted against the war unless and until they got good answers.
Then there's her vote for the resolution characterizing Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Anyone who cast that vote was taking a huge risk that George Bush would see it as a green light for war. Jim Webb understood that. Hillary Clinton ignored that risk, in the interests of wanting to look "tough on Iran."
more...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-novick/why-ill-be-voting-for-ba_b_88324.htmlSteve Novick is running for the United States Senate in Oregon because he's really worried about the direction of the country.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
