I'm committed

I have been on the fence in this political race until last night when my kids asked me who I would support in the upcoming elections. I took account of the candidates positions and records and realized that the only candidate that I could support was John McCain. Just for fun (and so I can remember for next time), I'll go over my thought process.

First, National Security: If we pull out of Iraq before we have a chance to put the pieces back together, we will be facing a much more dire security risk from the Middle East than if we bail out because it has turned uncomfortable, and unpopular. It will take political courage to stick with Iraq until it is self sustaining (my estimate... 2 to 10 years).

The Economy: I have been playing with a couple of economic models over the past few months and if they are as comprehensive as they are advertised to be, the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security situation will become a real problem within the next ten years. If you don't believe me, just look at the growth projections from the Congressional Budget Office. We can't afford another large entitlement program that is going to increase exponentially as baby boomers retire.

Taxes: Targeted tax cuts act as incentives, to expand business. If you lower the burden on business they will respond by growing, more importantly growing businesses make more jobs than shrinking business. If you want to shrink business you tax it. The AMT is a very regressive tax, it is basically a success penalty, do we really want to dis-incentivize success?

Education: The democrats want to improve education, which I support, unfortunately, they want to increase taxs and re-allocate to tuition, which will increase the supply for educated adults but will decrease the demand for them. I personnally think that tax incentives could be created for companies to invest in the educational process, after all they are going to be the ultimate benefactor of an upgraded workforce.

Immigration: Immigration is one of the toughest problems we face today! Huge national security problem, but it is also a huge demographic and economic issue as well.

Developed countries have all had problems with a lower birthrate than required to maintain a vibrant workforce. Our illegal immigration is filling a vacuum caused by our low birth rates and hot economy; if we were to eliminate the illegal workforce our economy would have millions more jobs than workers. In that situation the only two options are to shrink our economy, or to export jobs to other countries; none of the options would be popular. Our illegal immigration problem has made our demographic crush much less painful that of Japan, Europe, or Russia who are going through a much more severe demographic problem than we are. China is going to see a real problem when their one child policy hits their workforce in 10-20 years.

Rule of Law: Rule of Law is the counterargument to the demographic/economic argument, how can a nation of laws (rule-of-law is to governments what opposable thumbs are to mammals) reward a large population of citizens for breaking the law? I don't believe you can! To make matters worse, amnesty would not fix the demographic/economic problem that caused the illegal behavior to begin with. The illegal immigration problem is tough, and I'm not sure anyone has it figured out.

Goning back to McCain, he demonstrates the courage and conviction that I think will make him a very good President. While he and I don't completely align on the issues, his principled approach to policy gives me some comfort that he will not stray far from the positions he has articulated during his campaign, and I can support that.