SmallGovTimes.com

By: Steve Adcock | Published on 02/14/08    

Yet again, the current election cycle has produced more big government politicians who prioritize their own power and influence over the freedom and liberties of the American people. This time, the culprits are Republican John McCain and Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. All three front runners propose billions of dollars of additional spending and possess a genuine lack of interest in restoring constitutional principles to the United States government.

John McCain

John McCain is generally known as a “hawk” on our foreign policy and many establishment analysts have determined this to be one of McCain's greatest assets. But true believers in a small and limited federal government accurately recognize his crude dedication to maintaining and perpetuating wars on foreign lands to be his greatest liability.

Although McCain called for a withdrawal of troops from Somalia and Haiti in the early and middle 90's, the Arizona senator is head-over-heels in love with the Bush Doctrine of excessive nation-building and a distorted concept of “spreading freedom”, all funded at the expense of the American taxpayer. Over $600 billion later, McCain said that he is prepared to support a military presence in Iraq for 100 more years. McCain has also stated that military action in Iran, the administration's likely next target, cannot be taken off of the table.

After laying into McCain's admittedly violent temper, Paster and writer Chuck Baldwin wrote in a article published on this web site (“The McCain madness”) that “John McCain still has a vicious temper and is well known. We can all remember him singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," to the tune of the Beach Boys hit song "Barbara Ann." He also said North Korea should be threatened with "extinction." He often boasts of America's 100-year war with Iraq and talks of pursuing enemies "to the gates of hell." There is no doubt, John McCain is one mad man.”

In domestic matters, McCain originally opposed Bush's tax cuts, but to his credit, does generally stress a reduction in spending over cutting taxes. However, a National Taxpayers Union study found that John McCain's presidential platform would add nearly $7 billion dollars to the federal budget – which, of course, is merely a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of the war. He supported the GOP version of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, does not support Medicare means testing nor the ability of a self-employed individual to deduct health care costs from their taxes.

McCain has called for the closure of several unneeded military bases and believes that politicians keep those bases open purely for political reasons. Back in 1999, McCain proposed military base closures that would have saved an estimated $20 billion dollars. Ron Paul is the only candidate who openly supports the closure of the majority of our military installations around the world.

McCain supported an immigration bill that some liken to amnesty. The bill allows current illegal immigrants to remain in the country, but requires them to pay a fine and get in the back of the line to obtain citizenship. Unfortunately, what the senator doesn't realize is the majority of illegal immigrants do not want citizenship. Many of them are here to work and send money back to their families in Mexico, and then return to their homeland some time in the future. The solution is not citizenship, and I would expect a senator from a border state to recognize this phenomenon. The solution is preventing employers from hiring illegals in the first place and removing the ability for illegals to find work. Enforcing current immigration laws and protecting our border agents from baseless lawsuits is the first step towards a full-proof solution to immigration.

Barack Obama

According to the National Taxpayers Union, Barack Obama wants to spend nearly $300 billion in additional spending if elected to the White House. Although he believes in a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, the Illinois Senator does not support school vouchers, which give parents the right to more easily choose the school to send their child to. Obama supports $18 billion in pay increases for public school teachers, funded primarily through cuts to NASA.

Obama supports government-run universal health care and has pledged that by the end of his first term, the government will be heavily involved in controlling access to health care in the United States. Obama also supports a national smoking ban if he determines that local communities have failed to adequately police a person's ability to choose to smoke.

Obama supports the pay-as-you-go budget concept and supports reversing the Bush tax cuts, arguing they only benefit the wealthy. Instead, he supports tax cuts for the lower and middle class and an elimination of the loopholes that exist within our extensive tax code, which enables some heavy wage earners to pay less in taxes than those who make considerably less. He strongly supports a progressive tax and opposed a reduction in the estate tax, opposed an elimination of the death tax, and opposed a tax reduction on capital gains and dividends. The Illinois Senator apparently loves taxation, provided the government is taxing the right people.

Obama claims to oppose the war and support a withdrawal of troops from the area, but will not commit to any troop reductions if he is elected to the White House. He says the strain on the military with lengthy deployments is a problem that needs to be addressed. He likes to state the claim that he opposed the war from the start, but Obama was not serving in the Senate when the vote came to pass, unlike Hillary Clinton, who is now sprinting away from her original vote to authorize military action. He's said that the United States needs to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction and wants to heavily invest in humanitarian aid – funded, of course, through the forced generosity of the American people.

He supports a guest worker program and has vowed not to support an immigration proposal that does not include an “earned path to citizenship for the undocumented population”. Along with McCain, Obama needs to understand that citizenship is not the answer to our immigration problem. The institutional damage that exists within our immigration system is the root cause of the conflict, and until we have a president who is willing and able to address those problems, immigration will continue to be one of the United States' greatest domestic problems.

Obama supported a ban on the sale of semi-automatic weapons in his home state of Illinois and favors increased regulation and restrictions on the possession of firearms in the United States. In 2000, he voted in support of a bill that limits handgun purchases to no more than one a month and voted against a measure that allows people who are charged with violating gun restrictions in their homes to claim self defense. This means if a person breaks into your home and you shoot the criminal with an “unlawful” gun, you cannot use self defense as a reason for the use of the gun. Clearly, Barack Obama questions the validity of the second amendment.

Obama has a natural ability to energize his base supporters. His speeches are filled with excitement and people seem genuinely interested in what he has to say. Smooth-talking politicians scare me the most because their ability to seamlessly lead people down the wrong path is far too easy to accomplish.

Hillary Clinton

“We are going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good,” Clinton once said at a fundraising speech in San Francisco, California. Hillary Clinton's extreme focus and determination to solidify government power and influence over the American people is perhaps matched by no other U.S. politician. Her willingness to expand the federal government to monstrous proportions and ruthlessly sweep away the rightful earnings of the American people to support her own political compulsion is perhaps the greatest threat to our country that we've seen in recent history.

Hillary Clinton loves social programs. In fact, she's said so. During a speech before the Democratic National Convention in 2000, she stressed the importance of entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare and using the budget surplus at the time to save and modernize them. Like Obama, Clinton is critical of Bush's tax cuts, arguing that they favor the wealthy.

Clinton wants the government intimately involved in Health care, calling for the government to create a universal health care program, but does not support single-payer health care. Undeterred by her failed “Hillary Care” proposal during the 90's, Clinton has proposed an individual mandate that every citizen must have health insurance. She supports a workers' ability to keep their current employer-provided health care plan if they so choose. The cost of her plan is estimated at $110 billion dollars, yearly.

She also supports the expansion of the SCHIP program, which is a federal government program that gives states money to provide health insurance to families that have children, so long as their income is below a certain threshold but do not qualify for Medicare. Under Hillary's plan, the SCHIP program would also fund children in middle class households and even some families making over $100,000 a year. The estimated cost of the expansion adds up to $75 billion over five years.

Clinton voted for the McCain-Feingold act that implements restrictions on “soft money” contributions to political candidates and the ads that they run. In 2007, Clinton said that she believes the United States should move “toward a system of public financing that really works for candidates running for federal office. I will support that as president.”

Like Obama, Clinton also believes that a path to citizenship is the appropriate course of action to solving the immigration problem. Of course, the solution has nothing to do with legalizing the flock of illegals already in this country, but politics dictate that the support of the “undocumented” community bodes well for a politician's chances at election into the highest office in the land.

In 2007, Clinton supported New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, but quickly reversed her position and instead placed blame on the current administration for failing to do enough about the illegal immigration crisis in America. Spitzer eventually withdrew his proposal due to lack of support.

Clinton voted in favor of the authorization to use military force in Iraq in October, 2002. Although she opposes the war now, Clinton has refused to admit her original vote to authorize action was a mistake. In fact, in a Larry King Live interview, Clinton said, “No, I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade.” She gave Bush the authorization to use military action because “they thought they were right,” referring to the Bush administration.

At the moment, she supports an end to the war in Iraq, starting with a phased redeployment starting within days of her taking office. In the midst of a redeployment, Clinton wants to provide taxpayer's money to “secure” and “stabilize” Iraq, but not “propping up the Iraqi government.” Throwing more money into Iraq while simultaneously withdrawing significant troops from the area does not address the need to abandon the history of an expensive foreign policy that the United States government has tragically created and continues to maintain. Hillary claims that she will not “lose sight of our very real strategic interests in the region” and has committed to devoting “the resources we need to fight terrorism”.

Her words indicate a strong likelihood that the war will continue well into a Hillary Clinton presidency. There may be a few small troop withdrawals at times, but the balance of troops will remain in Iraq for several years to come, and the budget of the United States government is going to suffer the consequences of it, much to the dismay of the American people. Several recent polls show popularity for the war is very low, indicating the majority of people are frustrated with the longevity of the war, the cost of the engagement and seemingly no plan to end the hostility.

Perhaps in no other time in our nation's history have our politician shown this much drive and dedication towards solidifying power and influence within the confines of Washington D.C. These debauched politicians have debased the freedoms that our military is sent overseas to “protect”, have polluted the once-noble profession of representing the people AGAINST the government and turned it into a private club for the wealthy and a suited perch for the influential.

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