Why I am voting against Barack Obama

I can’t say why I’m voting for McCain because I’m against Obama much more than I’m for McCain. McCain was a distant third choice for me in the Republican primaries, and not because I was radically in favor of my first and second choices (I had significant reservations about supporting either Thompson or Giuliani). But I consider Obama unacceptable.

• His tax plan.
  • Raising marginal tax rates screws up incentives and hurts economic growth.
  • Raising taxes on savings and investment also hurts economic growth, and makes it harder for middle-class Americans to accumulate wealth, thus leaving us dependent on the government for our retirements.
  • Obama’s tax plan also shifts the tax burden even more disproportionally onto the top fifth of the population, and I don’t believe it’s healthy for a democracy if 80% of the population does not share the cost of the policies they vote for.
  • This is selfish of me, but I am one of the 14% of Americans whose taxes will go up under Obama’s plan. I make a decent income in an area with a very high cost of living, I save and invest a large percentage of my income (towards retirement and towards a downpayment on a house), and as a renter and a bachelor I am eligible for very few deductions and credits.
• His economic agenda. He has not said he wants to nationalize the Health Care and Financial sectors of the economy, but his announced policies are a major step in that direction. I don’t want my medical care, my personal finances, and my retirement plan to become even more politicized than they are now. I want to be free to make my own decisions and take my own risks, and I don’t mind bearing the consequences when I make a mistake.
• Entitlement reform. Obama’s plan for entitlements is to try to tax our way out of insolvency, which I don’t think is wise, or even viable. Obama also plans to create new entitlement programs, which is the precise opposite of what we should be doing: reining in the rate of growth of existing entitlement programs to a sustainable level.
• Foreign policy. Obama strikes me as being dangerously close to committing to negotiation as our only foreign policy tool. Maybe pragmatism would force President Obama to abandon his anti-war roots, but I’m afraid of taking the chance.
• His taste in colleagues. I don’t know of any evidence that Obama shares the radical views of Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, or that he shares the corruption of Tony Rezko. But all three are long-term associates of Obama whom he only distanced himself from when they became major political embarassments to him. One of Bush’s major flaws as President was that he tended to appoint the wrong people and support them for too long after it became clear they were the wrong people; I fear Obama shares that flaw.
• Judicial nominations. During his campaign, Obama made the following statement on how he decides if someone is qualified for the Supreme Court:”We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

  Call me old-fashioned, but I believe we should pick judges who understand the law and the constitution and will interpret it as written.

I won’t link to McCain’s donations page because McCain is taking federal funding for his general election campaign. Instead, here are the donations pages for the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Club for Growth.