Blogs For Victory

From McCain’s speech to NFIB:

As president, I intend to act quickly and decisively to promote growth and opportunity. I intend to keep the current low income and investment tax rates. And I will pursue tax reform that supports the wage-earners and job creators who make this economy run, and help them to succeed in a global economy. Serious reform is needed to help American companies compete in international markets. I have proposed a reduction in the corporate tax rate from the second highest in the world to one on par with our trading partners; to keep businesses and jobs in this country.

One of the most crucial economic issues in this campaign is the ability of American workers to benefit from exports to other nations, and how government policy can help them to do so. And here, too, I welcome the debate with the Democratic nominee.

I want to break down foreign trade barriers, so that America’s small businesses can compete abroad. When new trading partners can sell in our market, and American companies can sell in theirs, the gains are great and lasting. The strength of the American economy offers a better life to every society we trade with, and the good comes back to us in many ways — in better jobs, higher wages, and lower prices. Free trade can also give once troubled and impoverished nations a stake in the world economy, and in their relations with America.

At the same time, we have to help displaced workers at every turn on a tough road, so that they are not just spectators on the opportunities of others. And I have made that commitment with reforms to expand and improve federal aid to American workers in need. We need to help millions of workers who have lost a job that won’t come back find a new one that won’t go away.

Unfortunately, Senator Obama has a habit of talking down the value of our exports and trade agreements. He even proposed a unilateral re-negotiation of NAFTA — our agreement with Canada and Mexico that accounts for 33 percent of American exports. But we have a sharp disagreement here that I look forward to debating. If I am elected president, this country will honor its international agreements, including NAFTA, and we will expect the same of others. And in a time of uncertainty for American workers, we will not undo the gains of years in trade agreements now awaiting final approval.

And as we expand markets for Americans products, we must do more tax reform here at home. I will propose and sign into law a reform to permit the first-year expensing of new equipment and technology. We’re also going to keep the low rate on capital gains, so that businesses like yours can expand and create jobs instead of just sending more of your earnings to the government. And so parents can spend and save more for their own children, I will propose to double the size of the child tax exemption. I will also propose as well a middle-class tax cut — a phase-out of the Alternative Minimum Tax to save more than 25 million middle-class families as much as 2,000 dollars in a single year.

Another of my disagreements with Senator Obama concerns the estate tax, which he proposes to increase to a top rate of 55 percent. The estate tax is one of the most unfair tax laws on the books, and the first step to reform is to keep it predictable and keep it low. After a lifetime building up a business, and paying taxes on every dollar that business earns, that asset should not be subjected to a confiscatory tax.

Nothing better shows Obama’s economic illiteracy than his desire to increase the top rate on estates to a confiscatory 55% – only someone who believes the socialist fairy tale of economics could even consider something as regressive and discouraging as promising to take more than half of what a family earns once the head of the family enterprise dies. John McCain understands the basis of all prosperity – allowing people to keep as much of their own as possible as they will be far better stewards of it than any government bureaucracy, even if staffed with the most enlightened and selfless public servants imaginable; and given that such bureacracies are usually staffed with some of the most thick-headed and indolent people in the workforce, McCain’s beliefs are even more worthy of support.

As for me, I’d go even further – it isn’t enough to support small businesses, we should also be doing more to discourage the maintenance or emergence of very large businesses…those multi-national corporate behemoths who are nearly as deletrious to a free market as the most purblind government regulator. But at least McCain knows what is what – Obama knows only what his socialistic mentors told him, and as he’s never bothered to stroll outside the economic fever swamps of the left, he just doesn’t understand that the property of a small business belongs to the small business owner, not to Uncle Sam.

Additionally, Obama is a complete tool of the corrupt unions – unions who don’t want to compete with the workers of the world, but prefer to be protected by Uncle Sam from having to actually work hard and innovate. I can understand some of the frustrations of dealing with imports from China (and my preferred fix to that is to go from “free trade” to “freedom trade” – to trade more with democracies and, eventually, not at all with un-democratic States, but I digress), but the answer to such practices is not to wall ourselves in, but to work harder and smarter and just plain outcompete the Chinese and other thuggish regimes which use semi-slave labor to keep production costs down. The lesson of the past two centuries is that a tryant can beat some profits out of his slaves, but that his slaves cannot compete in the long run with free men and women. NAFTA has been a massive boon to the American economy, and more such agreements are wanted – McCain understands this, Obama doesn’t.

If you want liberty – including economic liberty – McCain is your man; if you want a government to wipe your nose and tell you that everything is going to be all right, vote Obama.