Thoughts from an Independent Voter on the Presidential Race

The past is treasure to remember or trash to throw away, but learning from it allows you to prepare and recycle as you plan for the future.

As voters think about the Presidential race and decide who they are going to select as the next President of the United States of America, I'd ask them to think more about the people of this country than any political party. Our economic woes started over 10 years ago with the re-instating of trickle down economics. We had a Republican President then, and the current Democratic President has been unable to reverse those policies because he was saddled with an obstructionist Republican controlled House of Representatives after his first year in office. Despite this, he has managed to track down our number one enemy, pass health care reform as promised, stop the bleeding of our job losses and held together a fiscal ship that by all standards was about to completely sink.

Now, we are asked to decide between someone who is struggling to keep our economy afloat, and someone who wants to go full blast over Niagara Falls with cutting, gutting of programs and a tax plan which increases the burden on 95% of our people in order to give the top 5% of earners even more of a tax break than they have already enjoyed for more than 12 years.

If you believe trickle down economics has worked for you in the past 12 years then you know for whom you should vote. If you are like me and learn from the past, the choice is obvious. The theory of trickle down economics is flawed. We should steer our fiscal ship away from the falls and the cut, gut philosophy of extremist who would shut the entire government down if they could with threats of cliff of no return. Once again, I point to the past. I recall another bad economic time when a guy named Bill was running against another guy named George; however, there was a third fellow by the name of Ross who brought out charts and sounded a lot like the doomsday forecasters in a certain party within a party today.

Back then, the guy named Ross was convincing, and I started to believe cut and gut were the only ways our country would right itself. A funny thing happened. Bill won not Ross or George, and the economy went into overdrive. Before his 8 years as President ended, our budget had a surplus and our debt was being paid down. The positive growth, not cut and gut, moved us in the right direction without throwing our seniors, our children, our poor and our disabled under the cut and gut bus. I learned something then. There is more than one way to right a fiscal ship. I'm not saying our government shouldn't find ways to reduce spending, but it doesn't have to come at the cost of our nation's soul. It doesn't have to hurt those among us who are least able to fight back.

A positive growth approach may actually require our government to spend more money short term to prime the pump for future growth. This is tried and true method just look to the past, FDR the New Deal. If you want to really see a difference in our economy, re-elect our current President and give him a Senate and House he can work with to institute some real change. Vote for Democrats to replace the Republicans up for re-election. Don't think I'm a Democrat. If they don't perform then we replace them with Republicans next time. It's time we all learn from the past.