Sen. Barack Obama recently made a major speech in Toledo, Ohio, about his economic plan. He promised 28 specific new benefits for the American voter, ranging from providing 95 percent of the population with a tax cut, to eliminating all taxes for seniors making less than $50,000 a year, to providing healthcare and a college education for everyone, to assisting every borrower who is in default on any loan from a car loan to a boat loan to a credit card.
When it came to how to pay for all that, he offered a lame promise to scour the budget line by line to find waste that could be cut and to promote a new "ethic of responsibility" so people live within their means.
If you go deep into his Web site, however, you can get a clue as to the real answer. There, he reveals that he would pay for his health plan by rolling back the Bush tax cuts and restoring the estate tax. Now, if you made more than $10,000 last year, that means you would pay for Obama's promises. In addition, he would withdraw from Iraq and take the money being spent to maintain that vital global strategic position in the national interest of the United States, and he would spend that money instead on his electoral promises.
Apparently, he will promise you everything and, in the process, sell the interest of the nation down the river to win this election.
John McCain won't, and if you have the good of the nation at heart, you will vote for McCain as the reasoned and prudent alternative. His is not the glib tongue of an orator, but it is the steady hand and sound judgment of a statesman.
-- Neal Andrews, Ventura