In the mean time, I'd like to take a moment to talk about some more important issues - namely, politics. I've taken the VoteMatch Quiz to try to figure out who I should vote for, and I have taken this many, many times. I think it fails to realize the comparative importance of some issues, or to adequately address them, but it is an interesting quiz nonetheless. Here are my answers for the quiz, and a brief defense on those I feel need it due to their contradiction with "party-line" politics:
Abortion is a woman's right: Support (read my previous postings to understand my change in view from "oppose")
Sexual orientation protected by civil rights laws: Strongly Support (again, blogged previously)
Permit prayer in public schools: Oppose (However, there are some exceptions: I think if a teacher sponsors a Christian club on campus, all attendees are in relative agreement about religion and thus the teacher should not be restricted from participating in the club. If this rule is applied to all teachers and all clubs, so that an Islamic club could also be on campus, then the state is not sponsoring a particular religion over another. Also, teachers should be allowed to acknowledge their own beliefs - meaning, if a student asks a teacher "what do you believe," the teacher should be able to relate his or her personal beliefs with the disclaimer that he or she is not saying the students should believe the same way.)
Death Penalty: Strongly Oppose (I'm also opposed to life sentences. Why are we so happily willing to throw away human life? I think people who feel that life sentences or death sentences are good need to spend a year in jail, just to see what it's like)
Mandatory Three Strikes Sentencing Laws: Strongly Oppose (See above)
Drug use is immoral: enforce laws against it: Oppose (Anyone should be allowed to do any drug they want so long as it is kept in a controlled environment. Meaning: cocaine bars would be perfectly fine so long as someone was there to make sure no one left while still under the effects of cocaine, and that no one got hurt. Home drug use of some drugs should be illegal in some situations. All public drug use should be illegal, including smoking and drinking. Your right to kill yourself with a drug ends when it encounters anyone else's right not to be killed by your use of that drug.)
Encourage Immigration and Offer Amnesty: Support. (Illegals want to come into our country for the jobs. That means they're going to work and contribute to the economy. How is this a bad thing? The people who don't want to work or contribute to the economy are people who've lived here all their lives)
More Spending on Armed Forces: Support. (We need a strong army, not only to protect ourselves from crazy people, but also to provide training and jobs to US citizens. The military does a mind-numbing amount of good work for this country even in non-military ways: for instance, the Internet was largely a military invention.
Require companies to hire more women and minorities: Oppose. (As long as companies cannot skip over women or minorities in their hiring practices, companies will hire the best person for the job, regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Companies exist only for the purpose of making money, and they will hire whoever is best suited to help them do that. This makes companies more competitive for good employees, and makes people more competitive to BE good employees. Forcing any other hiring rules only serves to, in certain cases, lower the bar, which serves absolutely no one.)
More federal funding for health coverage: Strongly Support. (Preserving the health and well-being of all its citizens is the basic definition of a government. In this day and age, medical care is a necessary component of that preservation. Picture this: A family with 2 parents and 2 children that makes $60k/year and can afford the basic necessities and can even afford to put some money aside for retirement or college. Everything is going great until the daughter develops a rare disorder that will kill her unless she gets a very expensive procedure. The parents' insurance will only cover the procedure up to $3,000 dollars, but beyond that, they require him to pay for the bills, and he cannot possibly afford to do so. In a country with socialized health care, the story of this family would be a happy one, because they could simply get the procedure done and move on with their lives. In the US, the parents would be forced to choose between saving their daughter's life or protecting their own quality of life, and that's really no choice at all. Once they had agreed to pay for the procedure, they would then spend the next 20 years pulling 2 jobs each just trying to pay off their steep medical bill, the work would stress them out to the point of damaging their own health, and their children's educational and social needs would be largely unserved and undeveloped. I just want everyone to have the happy ending to this story.)
Privatize Social Security: Neutral. (Social Security was a bad idea to begin with, but we're stuck with it now. Privatization would get it out of the hands of a government that has horribly mucked it up, but perhaps simply an overhaul of the system could repair the damage.)
Parents Choose Schools via Vouchers: Strongly Support. (We should not, as a country, limit religious instruction to the wealthy. The two possible arguments against it are: That Christians would be served while no other religions would be, and that if private school vouchers were available, no one would go to public school. To the first: if there were vouchers, then schools for other religions would become much more likely realities, and we're not serving their religious needs at the moment anyway so if someone doesn't have a religious school to go to, it's no different than life as it stands now. To the second: Good! If public school is so crappy that everyone would bail on public school and go to private school, maybe the idiots running our schools and governmental education bodies will wake up and realize that something is horribly, horribly wrong with our education system. Vouchers wouldn't completely pay for most private education, so many parents would continue to send their kids to public school - and many parents would prefer the secular environment of the public school anyway, regardless of their own religious affiliation.)
Reduce use of coal and oil: Support. (Coal: meh. It'd be good for the environment to cut back on coal, but it's still cheap and we don't have to rely on foreign governments much for it. Oil: Hell yes. It's horrible for the environment and under control of the 2nd-most powerful monopoly ever. The problem is that none of the alternatives presented so far (and I mean none) are actually good alternatives. Ethanol is the worst of these. Sure it burns cleaner than gas, but it still doesn't burn cleanly enough, and it requires us to grow more of something we're subsidizing through heavy government grants already: corn. Corn is great in small quantities, but because it is in literally everything we eat and drink, we have come to rely on it too much as well. And just think: if corn producers could sell even more corn, the price of it would skyrocket too, making our foods and drinks suffer.)
Allow churches to provide welfare services: Oppose. (This question is dangerously worded. Absolutely churches should be able to provide services to the poor, there's no question in anyone's mind about that. What this question means is that we replace a government-funded program of welfare with a religiously-funded one. This is dangerous for multiple reasons: First, the government can't monitor the activities of a religion, so how can we make sure that all people who need welfare are getting it? Second, what happens if the religions don't make enough money to support everyone?)
Decrease overall taxation of the wealthy: Oppose. (This question mostly has to do with the flat tax. Gravel's theory on it, that those who make more will spend more, works well on paper but falls apart when you realize that the fabulously rich spend a much smaller portion of their annual income on things that would be taxed than the poor do. A man with a 7-figure income can purchase a $4,000 TV without blinking an eye, and only be spending 1/1000th of his income. A man who makes $14,000 per year could only spend $14 in the same way, but that $14 is much more important to him, as he has to watch every penny that goes out. He couldn't even buy the HDTV he'll have to have to watch any programming in the near future. It is a phenomenally large tax on the poor. Now, a progressive income tax would be a possibility, but would be extremely difficult to figure out. If tax worked as such, it might be pretty good:
| Item Cost | Tax % |
| $0-10 | 0.5% |
| 10-100 | 1% |
| 100-1000 | 2% |
| 1000-10000 | 4% |
| 10000-100000 | 8% |
Of course, the numbers would have to be calculated based on people's normal spending and the math would get really complicated, but computers could handle it all.
Support and Expand Free Trade: Support. (Excepting national security risks or countries that are just being horrible jerks. The dollar is currently slipping against the rest of the world, and while opening our trade to other countries might lower it further, chances are it would help balance out the global economy and eventually lead to a more stable world.)
End Development of a Missile Defense ('Star Wars'): Neutral. (I'm torn, really)
Link human rights to trade with China: Strongly Support. (For that matter, why do we allow human rights problems anywhere in the world? China is far worse to its people than Saddam ever was, but we won't invade both because they have a huge military and because they are a major world economic power. That doesn't mean we should be bedfellows.) Sphere: Related Content
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