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Why I’m uneasy about voting for Obama.
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I think a storm is coming. I’m not any sort of economist, but recent events make me suspect that our economy is not in the best shape. Credit markets are still frozen, and things are a bit bleak. But still, that’s not the worst part. As has been pointed out by others, in the next 20-30 years, we are going to be facing an incredibly huge problem in the fact that the government is going to be bankrupt. We’re not going to be able to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and all of our other priorities much longer. It’s just not going to be possible with any rational projection of future growth.
So I think that bad stuff is coming down the pipe, and I don’t think there’s going to be any easy solution. And, as always seems to be the case when bad stuff hits, I think the people who are going to be in most danger of their lives and health will be the poor.
Now, I vary between libertarian, enviro-hippie, and filthy liberal, but in general, I am willing to accept that one legitimate role of government is to help keep people who are at the bottom of the economic ladder from starving or freezing to death. It seems to me as though providing a last net to try to catch folks who are falling fast is one part of a civilized society. And yes, I know that requires the government taking money away from folks and giving it to others who the first folks might not otherwise have given it to. I’m libertarian enough that that makes me uncomfortable, and liberal enough that I think that sometimes it may be justifiable anyway. I know it's strange to suggest that we need the government to help the poor through a crisis brought on by entitlement programs intended to help the poor--but I wouldn't have had nearly as much a problem with those entitlement programs in the first place if we had honestly acknowledged their cost and made the sacrifices needed to pay for them (or avoided them and allowed more economic freedom in the first place, maybe, but I digress.)
If we do indeed get smacked by a serious and ongoing economic problem, there are going to be a lot of people who will need help. I think that helping them would be a good idea; maybe something like the WPA. If we can give folks work while shoring up national infrastructure, then maybe that would be good in the end. However, something like that is going to be very, very expensive, and someone’s going to have to pay for it.
If we’re in an economic crisis brought about by irresponsible acquisition of debt, then I don’t see how borrowing huge sums of money to pay for a project like that is going to be effective in getting out from under the problem. Thus, the money will have to come from a combination of increased taxes and reductions in spending elsewhere. It will require substantial sacrifice on the part of the American people, in other words, and we’ll need a leader who can call for that sacrifice and persuade us to make it.
And I don’t think Obama will do that.
I think he’s capable of it. I admire his persuasive speaking; it’s one of the things I think best qualifies him to be President. But based on his enthusiastic support of the recent bailout bill, his statements about how we need to help keep folks who took loans they couldn’t afford from being foreclosed on, and his difficulty in identifying any area of his plan that he would be willing to cut if forced to do so by financial constraints, I don’t know if he can do it. If we hit really hard times, would President Obama be willing to ask people in the middle class (heck, even the lower middle class) to share in the sacrifice to help keep Americans alive during the storm? Would he be willing to raise taxes across the board—not just on the wealthy, but on everyone? Would he be willing to cut not only corporate welfare, but also federal science funding?
As much as I like Obama, and in general like his policies, I’m not convinced by his stances so far that he would be willing to call for real sacrifice from all Americans if it came to it. I fear that if the time came when we all had to take the hit to help protect the weakest and most vulnerable among us, Obama would not make the right call. I have no doubt that he would spend money to help the poor, but I think he would choose to get it from borrowing—and I don’t think we can afford to do that any more.
I’m not at all convinced that McCain would be any better about this, and he’d be even less persuasive if he did make the call. I could maybe—maybe—believe he would be slightly more willing to ask all Americans, wealthy and not, to share the load, but I don’t remember him showing any resistance to the bailout either.
I’ll probably still vote for Obama, because I think that he presents other good reasons to vote for him. But I am not convinced that when the bad stuff comes, he’ll be able to make himself unpopular by saying it’s time for us all to take the hit so that we can protect those who are the most vulnerable among us.
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