Election Becomes An Ideological Battle

The 2012 election is shaping up to be a battle between two competing ideologies. On the left we have Barack Obama who has promised bigger government and higher taxes and on the right we have Mitt Romney who promises lower taxes and smaller government. Okay, maybe we shouldn’t kid ourselves about Romney. He isn’t the second coming of Reagan, neither is Paul Ryan. In the very least though Romney promises to hit the pause button on socialism creep and he’s likely to roll back at least Obamacare. So we really do have two competing ideologies and a very clear choice that we voters have to make.

Recently Obama vowed to bail out more industries because according to him the auto bailout worked so well. One wonders what industries need bailing out, no one is clamoring for any these days. But was the auto bailout a success? If you’re a union yes but for everyone else it really wasn’t. GM wasn’t going to get liquidated in a bankruptcy, it was merely going to get its debt restructured. Few jobs would have been lost had a regular bankruptcy taken place. Instead Obama bailed out the auto industry and it cost taxpayers $25 billion. This President wants more of that.

Obama claims to offer a new vision of America where prosperity is shared. This is not the same vision of America most people have. In truth, prosperity has always been shared. When the rich are successful, so is everyone else. This new vision isn’t really new at all, Obama’s vision is socialism. He believes in equality or near equality of outcomes. This is a new vision for America, it’s an old vision for Europe which has embraced socialism and abandoned freedom. This is in stark contrast to Romney’s vision, as stated by Paul Ryan that we believe in equality of opportunity not equality of out come. The Romney vision is more in line with what this country has believed for the better part of 200 years. The Obama vision is new for this country, though it is old socialism.

Even in tax policy we see a stark contrast between the two candidates. Obama wants to raise taxes by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. This means taxes on dividends will increase to 44%, top rates will hit 39%. He’s already allowed America to have the highest corporate tax in the world at 35%. Romney isn’t even proposing tax cuts. He wants to keep the rates we currently have, which of course is called a cut by unscrupulous Democrats. Any cuts he offers are focused primarily on the middle class but he doesn’t appear to have any upper income tax cuts that aren’t offset by eliminating complicated deductions.

On November 6th we will decide who the next President is going to be. We can either have four more years of Barack Obama and thus have the socialism he promises. We could have Mitt Romney who at worst will pause the race toward socialism and at best will roll some of it back while he embraces smaller government and free markets. We must live with the consequences no matter who we pick. But with Obama, another four years and his new vision will be complete. He will have fundamentally transformed America like he said he would during the 2008 campaign. Do we really want his new vision and his fundamental transformation to take place?