So I’m sitting here working with the TV on MSNBC in the background, trying to soak up a little bit of knowledge to help me decide who to vote for in the upcoming presidential election. John McCain, afterall, is going to be having a rally at the Scwartz Center at Cape Fear Community College in about an hour or two, only a few miles from where I sit here typing. In fact, on my TV right now he’s talking in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
I’ve considered myself an Obama lean for a while, but I think there are two issues that are making me lean that way even more right now. One is that John McCain wants to put an income tax on health insurance. I don’t know what the reasoning is for that, but I’ve been meaning to look into it.
The other issue is one that Sarah Palin just brought up in her introduction to John McCain, and it’s that one of the things they want to do to help with the current energy crisis is to drill more off the American shore. The crowd loved the idea, going into a chant of “Drill, baby, drill!” I’m totally against that though. I think if we drill oil to bring down the cost of gas (which actually came own quite a bit over the weekend- we paid $3.29 a gallon) it will put off the urgency to look for alternate energy sources, which I think is something that needs to be taken care of in all immediacy.
In other political news right now, it appears that one of the things that will happen with the $700 billion bailout plan is to help delinquent mortgage payers stay in their home. I’m mixed on that. I’m sure there are some people with legitimate problems with it- people with families and health problems or whatever who made a smart decision in buying a home but then lost their job, things like that. What really irritates me about this though is that I’ve been in my house for two and a half years now and paid my full mortgage on time every month. Sometimes it was tough, but you know what? I did it. Things might have been tight now and then but I budgeted and I was responsible with my money and I paid my mortgage. So now we’re rewarding people who have been financially irresponsible? I’m so glad to see my tax money at work.
Back to the energy issue, McCain did just say he wanted to also invest in electric automobiles and named just about every type of alternative energy resource available to man, so I guess I might have to look into that some more too.
Zach Dotsey