The Tax Issue: Why I Voted for Obama Over McCain--a draft

I based my vote in the recent presidential election on only one issue: taxes. That's why I voted for Barack Obama and against John McCain.

McCain wanted to continue Bush's tax cuts for the rich and then add another 80+ billion dollars in cuts to it. Obama campaigned saying he wanted to eliminate those tax reductions, and this is exactly what he needs to do if he wants to get us out of this recession.

Unfortunately, a few weeks back Obama said he may not seek to immediately eliminate those tax cuts even though they are proven job killers.

Republicans still cling to the notion that tax cuts for the rich will stimulate job growth, but reality has proven them wrong time and again. Only 2.7 million private sector jobs were created from June 2001 until now, the worst job creation on record for anywhere near that length of time.

Tax reductions for the rich result in the suppression of job growth. And this is particularly clear in the Bush case.

When publicly traded, limited liability corporations experience declining revenues, dividends and share prices, CEO's look for ways to attract investors to purchase their shares and bid up their stock prices. A tax cut for the rich presents an opportunity for CEO's to lure that newly available money to their stocks and away from their rivals since the affluent tend to invest this extra cash rather than buy stuff.

During the financially dreary Bush years, and with the economy still weak from 2001-05, CEO's needed to make their companies more attractive to investors. They did this by pushing up the bottom line: profits. They achieved this by shipping jobs overseas, by laying people off and by cutting wages, salaries and benefits.

That's why the result of the Bush tax cuts was historically anemic job growth and a $2,000+ plus drop in real family income. It's also why the rich got richer. In other words, the Bush tax cuts for the rich redistributed income upward from the middle class.

The Bush tax cuts weakened the demand sector terribly, with the result possibly the worst economic expansion since statistics have been kept (2001-2007) and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A vote for McCain was a vote for continuing this insanity by redistributing more income toward the upper classes and away from people who actually produce and purchase goods and services: otherwise known as the wealth of nations. Things would have gotten worse under McCain.

On the other hand, Obama was astute enough to declare that he wanted to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire. Whether he recognized those cuts were job destroyers or not is unimportant.

It doesn't take half a brain to figure out that the problem with the U.S. economy isn't the sub-prime mess because that's only a symptom of the real cause: the mal-distribution of income and wealth during the past thirty years.