Supporting Obama with trepidation

My fiercest debating adversary is Vic. He keeps sending me information to deter me from voting for Obama. I posted one fairly persuasive piece a bit ago. He’s sent me another item that’s worth considering.

It ends with the comment, “The bottom line is that I support John McCain. With trepidation.”

In the same vein I could say I still support Obama with trepidation. I think that unlike McCain, Obama actually understands some of the columnists tricky economic worries. I’ll agree that the folks who will elect Barack will expect him to enforce uncompetitive policies that could hamstring America’s and the world’s economy. On the other hand, I fervently hope, his campaign backed as it has been by a non-Democrat Party groundswell will give him much freer reign from party and particularly Union orthodoxies than other Presidents like George W Bush. Bush hewed to far too many wrongheaded ideological principals – both those of Dick Cheney and James Dobson. I voted for W in 2000 without any trepidation never realizing how incompetently he would preside over the Country. Maybe now that I’m on the verge of becoming an old man I should start viewing every candidate for the Presidency with trepidation. You know, “The greates thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Of course, blissfully ignorant complacency ain’t so great either. We let the financial community think they could have their bad debt forgiven by the government. Oops! Under a President Obama we daren’t let American citizens in general think the same thing. Apropos of this was a very interesting parenthetical assertion in the column worth considering:

(It is one of the great myths of 21st century that the Bush tax cuts made the tax code less progressive; the opposite is true. If you are in the bottom 38% of taxpayers, you now pay zero income tax—and therefore have an incentive to support any spending bill that comes down the pike.)

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