Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Punish Success

I've been wanting to address this for awhile, buy I didn't want to seem like I'm whining. But this video just made me so angry I'm going to go there.

Here is the conversation between the man and the video and Obama:

Plumber to Obama: “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more. Isn’t it?”

Obama: “It’s not that I want to punish your success, I just want to make sure that everybody that is behind you, that they have a chance for success too. I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

This is socialism. Pure and simple.

Over the years, as many of you know, I have given of my time and treasure to help those less fortunate. The difference between what I do and what Obama wants us to do is that I do it voluntarily AND it goes straight to those who need the help and in the manner I wish for it to help, instead of through a bloated government bureaucracy. I want to spread the wealth too, I just don't want to be forced to do it.

When my husband and I got married 25 yrs ago, he was still in college. He put himself through college. We spent years paying back low interest school loans. We didn't have 2 nickles to rub together. I remember regularly going to a happy hour that had free appetizers. We would order a beer and the appetizers would be our dinner.

We bought used cars. We survived seven layoffs. We bought houses below what we could afford and we went in and put in wood floors, painted, and fixed up and then sold them at a profit. When we had our children I was determined to stay home. I shopped at garage sales, I bought used baby furniture and fixed it up.

For 20 years we put 19% of our income into savings and investments. We have no debt. We never ever carried any credit card debt. We only bought used cars when we could pay cash for them. I could write a book on how we saved money.

All that work and effort has paid off. We are doing very well and of course we have no debt. But we do have 2 children in college and five cars (3 of my kids are driving and live in 3 different towns). So, although we do very well we have a lot of expenses.

And now, Obama wants to do exactly what he says he doesn't want to do......punish our success. We scrimped and saved for so many years so we could reap the benefits of our hard work and Obama is just going to take it away.......just like that. We already pay an insane amount of taxes (our property tax bill alone is $10,000 a year). And now Obama will take more.

I never thought in my lifetime that socialism would come knocking at my door.

But here it is.