Only two days left until U.S. Presidential Election Day 2008. It is absolutely imperative that everyone goes out and votes no matter where you stand on the issues. America is only strong because of our DIFFERENCES and our continuous ability to have peaceful transfer of power.
Neither man will destroy the economy or our safety (both propose increasing the military by 90,000 or so)
. If we do end up with Democrats in power in both the Executive and Legislative branches, DO NOT WORRY, conservatives! In two years, come hell or high water, Americans will have a chance to wipe Democrats out of Congress and fill the seats with Republicans, thereby checking the "liberal agenda". Having said that, below is my stand on the issues that I care about most. (If you would like to hear some comparisons of the two campaigns up to this point, I suggest listening to last Thursday's episode of the Diane Rehm Show. You can listen to the podcast
here.)
First, the most important issue to me is
healthcare, not Iraq or taxes or the economy. Approximately 50 million Americans are currently not insured and many more are under-insured. On top of that, we all know that actually receiving benefits is often a complicated uphill battle against an army of people whose job it is to deny benefits. Some estimates are that 16,000 Americans die each year from not having (enough) insurance. That does not happen in other western nations. John McCain will tax healthcare costs paid by your employer and then offset the costs with a tax credit. This will work for most people and let you choose doctors out of network or state. Barack Obama will require all but the smallest employers to offer health insurance and you can choose to deny it. Estimates are that Obama's plan will drastically reduce the number of uninsured people in the US compared to a much smaller reduction with McCain's plan.
Second,
Energy Policy/
Science & Technology Funding/
Education/
National Security-these are inextricably linked in my view. The US is failing to keep pace in all these areas and a paradigm change is required
now to keep our advantage 50 years from now. Many government reports have already warned of this including the most prominent entitled "The Gathering Storm". The connection is this: our young people are BAD in math and science, we rank 16th and 20th among college and high school graduation rates, respectively. These young people will need to innovate into the next century to keep the USA strong.
Why? Because half of the increase in US GDP has been attributed to advances in science and technology. These innovations will require funding from government agencies like the NIH and NSF whose budget increases barely keep pace with inflation in recent years.
What about energy? New energy sources and processes require huge amounts of innovation and represent a tremendous opportunity for increasing US global assets. A larger amount of US global assets always have brought periods of greater leverage to
US interests throughout the world. Possessing the basic science and technology of the 21st century power source (wind, solar, etc.) is so much more important than having won the space race of the 1960's or the nuclear arms race. The superpower status of America would be undeniable for remainder of the century. (Please go
here to see some comparisons of the two campaigns provided by the journal
Science.) Senator Obama's budget proposal lays out
75-100x as much funding for securing America's position at the
global leader in energy into the
22nd century. The one specific thing I will say about the stump speeches coming out of the McCain Campaign. They are showing a real disregard and understanding of science research. Sarah Palin in back-to-back sentences called for
ending wasteful spending on fruitfly research and then
increasing NIH funding to support finding cures for (among other things) Down's Syndrome. If she had a basic understanding of science she would know that fruitflies are one of the best models for studying genetics and are frequently used to understand genetic disorders like Down's Syndrome (a "trisomy" of the 21st chromosome) in humans.
These are the issues that are important to me and that is why I am voting for Barack Obama. Reasonable people can have principled differences on the issues and, as I said in the beginning of this post, principled differences are what makes America strong. I have no interest in discussing ACORN or 'Joe the Plumber' or Bill Ayers or 'spreading the wealth' or '$150,000. wardrobes' . If that makes me uninformed, so be it. Let's all be
CITIZENS of this great nation and put the time and energy into finding out who we want in office and leave it to our children to be entertained with 30-second commercials and colorful, catchy bumper stickers.
As a final note I would like to ask that many more people tune into the Diane Rehm Show on NPR for the latest information on important issues. There is not a smarter, more informed radio host out there. She is 72 yrs old and has the wisdom of someone twice her age!
