Obama's Tax Plan

So, not to distract from our pursuit of life, love, food, shopping and happiness, I'm very concerned about the upcoming election and our future. I'll take some posts to try and figure stuff out - choose the better of two evils. Feel free to bypass these political meanderings.

As we all know, I am a democrat. However, I struggle with a few things. One being, if you work hard for something, you should be rewarded for that or be allowed to keep the reward. Someone from work had forwarded me an email between a father and daughter. The daughter was saying it wasn't fair how at college, she was the only one in her work group to work on the project and everyone else got to get the A for it. The father goes, welcome to the Republican Party.

Similarly, in my Forbes magazine (not the most left leaning periodical), there's a excerpt from Investor's Business Daily, "Senator Obama has proposed lifting the tax cap on earnings subject to the 12.4% Social Security tax, which now covers only the first $102,000... The take-home pay of 10.3 million workers would be reduced by an average of $5,650 in the first year alone. Taxes would be raised on 4 million workers over the age of 50. Taxes would also be raised on 3 million small business owners who file their taxes as individuals. By fiscal 2015 the number of job opportunities lost would exceed 865,000 and personal savings would decline by more than $55 billion... Eliminating the earnings cap would raise taxes for many middle-class families, impose a huge tax burden on small business, slow the economy and cut jobs."

A couple things. Small businesses do not have to file as individual and be taxed on the personal level. I'm not an accountant but to me it would be better to be taxed at the lower corporate level. What's also infuriating is that I'd be okay with paying taxes if I knew it was going to something good and not being wasted. Our tax money is flushed down the toilet all the time (hello, record oil revenue for Iraq) and we have to be taxed MORE because our government can't manage money.