by Sarah Tarver
News editor
At top left: Current President Barack Obama. Obama attended Harvard Law School and was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 and the U.S. Senate in 2004. He is married to Michelle Obama, and they have two daughters Malia and Sasha. For this second running, he is keeping the same running mate, current Vice President Joe Biden.
At top right: Mitt Romney, GOP presidential candidate for 2012. Romney graduated from Brigham Young University and attended Harvard Law and Harvard Business School. He says he is not a “career politician.” In 2002 he was elected governor of Massachusetts. He is married to Ann Romney, and they have five sons and 18 grandchildren. Romney has not currently chosen a running mate.
This political corner is about five main issues: abortion, energy, national deficit, taxes, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and transgender rights.
All information regarding the presidential candidates can be found on their sites: http://www.barackobama.com/ and http://www.mittromney.com/.
As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are the official presidential canditates, I will be looking at only their stances on these issues.
Obama combines several issues together under “women’s health”, including the contraceptive debate and, with that, abortion.
He makes it very clear that although he is pushing to make contraceptives affordable and part of the basic health care package, it is still going to be up to the individual as far as what she does. In essence, he is pro-choice.
There are of course still concerns about Obamacare, which is where he has placed all of his health care ideas, including these, into motion. The Supreme Court is expected to give its decision about the constitutionality of Obamacare sometime before the end of June.
On his website, Romney does not specifically talk about women’s health or abortion but rather about heath care in general. His health care stance is very easy to state; it is the opposite of Obamacare.
Whether this is a good thing or bad thing is left up to people to decide for themselves. I only offer this bit of advice: read and dissect everything.
Romney says that Obamacare raises taxes, but Obamacare supporters say this isn’t true.
There isn’t room here to go into every bit of Obamacare, especially since that is not the main issue that is being discussed, but I encourage everyone to look up the actual bills and read them.
The next topic is energy. Let’s start with Romney this time.
His plan is stated as follows: “The first step will be a rational and streamlined approach to regulation, which would facilitate rapid progress in the development of our domestic reserves of oil and natural gas and allow for further investment in nuclear power.”
In other words, he plans to develop reserves here in the United States as well as look into nuclear power possibilities.
His plan continues with “The United States is blessed with a cornucopia of carbon-based energy resources. Developing them has been a pathway to prosperity for the nation in the past and offers similar promise for the future.”
Or, as I read it, “I am going to rephrase what I just said and hope you don’t notice.”
As for Obama, he is pushing for solar and wind energy as well as having “set a 10-year goal to develop and deploy cost-effective clean coal technology, and to put online several commercial demonstration projects within four years.”
The difference then is wind and solar versus natural gas and nuclear power, with both looking into clean coal reserves and domestic oil.
National deficit and taxes go hand in hand. Obama has already placed his tax plans into action, and according to his site, he has “cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. He has also signed 18 tax cuts for small businesses and extended the payroll tax cut for all American workers and their families, putting an extra $1,000 in the typical middle-class family’s pocket.”
As for the national deficit, there is a “clock” located at http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ that gives an estimate of the current deficit, and although I would like to put a number here and say “this is it,” it changes by the second, so this is impossible.
All I can say is that despite the repeated promises that Obama is reducing the deficit, it is going up each second, not down. So he may be cutting taxes, which is nice, but what about our debt as a country?
Romney’s site states that “In approaching the nation’s fiscal challenges, President Obama has repeatedly called for a ‘balanced approach,’ by which he means cutting spending but also raising taxes.”
Personally, I am a bit confused; were taxes raised or lowered? Obama claims they were lowered for “95 percent of working families,” so does this mean that they were raised for the other 5 percent, or is Romney inaccurate when he says that Obama has admittedly raised taxes?
Either way, this does not add up, but let us continue with Romney’s plan as far as taxes go.
He promises to “Make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates, maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends, and capital gain, eliminate taxes for taxpayers with AGI below $200,000 on interest, dividends, and capital gain, eliminate the Death Tax, and repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).” Sounds good. I will believe it when I see it.
Finally we come to the last topic for this column: LGBQT.
Romney does not seem to have an opinion on this as far as his official campaign site goes. There is no stance on any sort of LGBQT or equal rights on his site anywhere, although he does make sure to have a special section on gun rights.
Obama puts LGBQT issues under a blanket of “Equal Rights” but also includes a timeline of all the changes he has made to assist the LGBQT community. This timeline can be located at https://s3.amazonaws.com/obama.3cdn.net/a10f6a89da07a046fe_hum6bn0ej.pdf.
In general, his site offers the following synopsis: “The repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is just one example of progress we’ve achieved together over the last three years.
The Obama administration declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional and called for its repeal and was the first to provide hospital visitation and medical decision-making rights to same-sex couples.”
At the end of the day, it comes down to not what you think but what is best for the nation, and our next president must understand that and be willing to do what is best for our nation as a whole, even if it is not necessarily what he would like to do personally.