I never thought our first African American President would be the one to bring back slavery. But obviously I’m no psychic.

In a hideously underpublicized clause of Barack Obama’s plans for his first term, one I wasn’t even aware of until yesterday, there is word of a mandatory service initiative, a “calling on” of all American citizens to donate a certain amount of time per year to community projects. Every middle and high school student will be required to do 50 hours, and every college student will be required to do 100 hours per year of enrollment. Retiring citizens, age 55 and over, will be “encouraged” to serve in programs appropriate for their age group, and all other citizens will be pushed to join one of the many programs Obama wants to either grow or start up, namely the Peace Corps, Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, Veteran Corps, Head Start, and Youth Build.

Note that I am not anti-community service. I have done a decent share of it throughout my life, starting with making layettes in my dad’s Crisis Pregnancy Center office to participating in Walk for Life to giving 17 inches of my hair to Locks of Love to tutoring, and I don’t plan on being an stingy, uncharitable adult in the years between now and my death. Charity is good. Community service is good. People should do it.

But requirement? Not only does this completely contradict the very heart of charity, it is borderline slavery. The government cannot control our time and our good deeds. We are not indentured by our citizenship. If a legal adult does not want to do community service, that’s a legitimate choice. It is none of anyone else’s business. We’re being treated like criminals, but instead of a court-ordered service to compensate for a misdemeanor, it’s a government mandate to further a socialist, false utopian agenda.

Did I mention the bribery involved? Obama is offering a $4,000 tax credit to be applied directly to a college student’s tuition should he or she complete the 100 annual hours of community service (overall, $1,000 per year for the average student). This promise 1) negates the term “charity” and 2) forces American taxpayers to shove out payment for work that would have otherwise been done by true volunteers at no cost. Even as a college student who could certainly use an extra 4k in my UNC account, I think this idea is ludicrous and backwards.

While change.gov has made some slight alterations to the careful wording of the “Service” paragraph, eliminating the word “require” that appeared frequently in the first published draft, the principle is the same, as is the underlying problem: we are being turned into the government’s slaves.

Time to re-excavate the Underground Railroad, huh?

This is the third shift in a row that I've spent hours sitting at our customer kiosk with absolutely nothing to do. There are no customers now, there haven't been since I got here two hours ago, and there probably won't be for the next two hours I have to stay awake through before I go home. I'm bored out of my mind.

So I took the opportunity to think. And if you know me at all, you know my mind wandered to politics. With only four days until the election, this whole economic recession thing is just now hitting me. I knew it was bad, but I didn't see it affecting me too strongly. After all, I'm poor, I have no stock or investments, no 401K, no business ownership in jeopardy, and I'm just a kid. I thought I'd be immune from the aftermath of an economy gone sour, but the silence in this empty Best Buy is screaming otherwise.

If we fall into recession, it's affecting every single one of us. Companies, even huge ones like the one I work for, will have to budget labor hours into such scarcity as to lay off employees left and right. I'm new at this store, so if my department needs to trim the fat, I'm the first to go. I wouldn't be able to find another job because no one would be hiring. I'd run out of money fast. I wouldn't be able to buy food for myself or help pay my college bills or put gas in my car. I would have no idea what to do.

What about everyone else? The people who have to pay rent every month and feed their kids and keep the electricity on? Their collectors will come to call much faster than mine if their money runs out. The pending recession became a frightening reality to me tonight. And what is further frightening is the idea that this recession is signed, sealed, and delivered if Obama wins on Tuesday.

Every other time in history that the U.S. has neared recession and subsequently raised taxes, economic doom has followed. Obama has been pressed on this and has stuttered nonesense about how this time it won't happen. Because he's just awesome enough to defy historical fact.

Here's the bottom line: When Obama's tax promises go into effect, any hope of economic well being plummets. It goes right down the drain. Unemployment will skyrocket. My own might contribute to that figure, as might yours. So on Tuesday, please vote McCain, and then come buy a cell phone from Best Buy. I'll thank you twice for double-insuring my job security.

I don’t like to be lied to. I think that’s a trait I share with just about 100% of all Americans. We like to be in the know, we don’t like it when people patronize us or pull the wool over our eyes, and when others lie, we typically get angry. There was that Clinton fallatio business, accusations over Bush’s WMD statements, and that whole Watergate thing. Presidents lie. And we don’t like it.

But usually the lies come post-election. Seldom are lies told during campaign season, because we’d never voluntarily elect a liar, right?

Yeah, if that were the case, McCain would be creaming B.O. instead of clawing his way to a tie. America has been bamboozled into electing a man who is engaging in blatant lies before even being inaugurated.

I’m not talking about the birth certificate rumors or the “Muslim” school accusations or even his ridiculously shady campaign finance (although I can’t promise I won’t harp on that some other time). I’m talking about his economic plan.

You make less than $250,000 a year, right? So you’re among that 95% Obama keeps talking
about, right? The 95% that he promises won’t see any increase whatsoever in taxes? The only people getting taxed are those evil corporate executives, the ones who have the audacity to employ millions of people and stimulate the economy and donate exorbitant amounts to charity. The tax hikes are just for the multi-millionaire professional athletes and movie stars and talk show hosts. And they all seem to be ready and willing to redistribute their wealth. So for the Left and the middle class, Obama’s tax plan is utopian.

If only. Here’s the truth: Obama is not going to raise taxes. Technically. But he is going to allow Bush’s tax cuts to lapse, returning everyone’s tax rates to their 2000 levels, an increase on all 100% of the American people, no matter the income. And that’s an increase you’ll see, even if you’re in that 95% he keeps babbling about. It’s a flat out lie.

Small business owner and political analyst Ned Barnett* did the math for us by taking his 2007 income figures and plugging them into the pre-Bush tax plan, the same state Obama would allow us to return to under his economic “wisdom.” The difference? An increase of $3,824. And he’s a regular, middle-class guy making way under $250k.

So how much will your taxes go up? How much will the single mother’s taxes go up? The schoolteacher’s? The just plain poor? Everyone’s taxes are going up with Barack Obama’s plan, and that’s the truth. While the Obama campaign keeps harping on McCain for his tax cuts for the wealthy, a larger scope reveals that McCain is cutting taxes for everyone. Not a single person will see an increase in their taxes, including the 5% that Obama wants to tax into bitterness. McCain will make Bush’s tax cuts permanent as well as instate his own. He’s going to cut taxes and cut spending, whereas Obama is secretly going to increase both. Do you really think this is the kind of economic irresponsibility we need at the brink of a recession?

ATTENTION HALF OF AMERICA: YOU’RE BEING LIED TO. Wake up and vote for John.

* Check my sources at: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/senator_obamas_four_tax_increa.html

While I always pictured Robin Hood as a cartoon fox in a jaunty green number, he is, apparently, a 47-year old Senator of Kenyan/Caucasian birth sporting everything but a flag pin. I had no idea.

But perhaps you’d say that Robin Hood was a good guy. Someone you’d like to vote for. He helped the poor and stuck it to that evil King Richard and made everything better for the whole land. And maybe this was a legitimate cause under a stagnant English monarchy wherein the poor were truly unable to thrive. But this is America, and that’s just not the way we do things.

A friend of mine told me about one of her coworkers, a guy who is fully aware of Obama’s socialist tendencies but doesn’t seem to mind. “What’s wrong with that?” he asked my conservative compadre, baffled that her opposition to socialism was her main argument against Barack. I guess on the surface, a socialist nation doesn’t look so bad. Everyone has the same amount of money so no one feels inferior or is destitute, and all the people start and stay on the same class level. It’s like a private school with uniforms: if we all look the same, no one will be jealous or distracted or slutty.

I went to a private school one year. I hated those plaid skirts and cardigans more than anything in my life.

Barack Obama’s agenda to “spread the wealth around” is frightening. What’s more frightening is how he thinks it’s N.B.D. He’s been talking about a socialized economy (and socialized health care, but I’ll rip on that some other day) since this whole thing started, and people have been going right along with it. The way Obama explains his system, with his taxation of big corporations and tax credits to middle and lower class families, sounds just like President Robin Hood, only in Obama’s case it’s the rich stealing from the rich and giving to the less rich (because let’s face it, America, no one here is truly impoverished by international standards).

I know the story has been harped on endlessly since the last debate, but I feel it’s relevant here, so here’s my comparison using Joe the Plummer:
Obama’s new tax policies would discourage success. Joe wants to better himself by buying a company, something he has worked very hard to be able to do, but once he does so, he’ll be taxed into the poor house and have to close his brand new business. And Obama’s claim that only a “small percentage” of small businesses will be affected by his tax reform is crap; the average small business is making $3.6 million per year, and Obama’s plan would tax them almost $230,000 per year more than they’re paying now. I don’t know about you or your small business, but I say 230k is a decent chunk of change, one I’d rather not see spread into a socialist system that provides cash for the undeserving.

Allow me to make my last statement clear: NOT EVERYONE DESERVES GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE. There are some people in America who do absolutely nothing for themselves. Spoiled brat princess girls, drug addicts who make no attempt to quit, the just plain lazy. I will not pad their pockets, understand? I work hard for the money I earn, and if I continue to work hard and someday become wealthy, I should not be penalized for it, and those who have not worked hard should not be rewarded for it. America is a land of opportunity. The American Dream is achieving enormous success from humble beginnings, and when we begin to cut down those who make it to the top, people will stop aiming for it. Why should Joe the Plummer be motivated to buy the company he wants when it’s a guaranteed tax hike? He might as well stay where he is because it’s less stress, less responsibility, and essentially more pay.

So if no one is willing to take on the stress and responsibility and voluntary pay cuts, who’s going to lead us? Who’s going to shoot for the stars and start the small businesses and further our economy and participate in capitalism and stimulate ingenuity? When Obama’s in charge? No one.

Funny how a man who is running under a guise of hope is proposing legislation that quashes optimism. Enjoy turning into Cuba, people. I’ll be the one saying I told you so.

A friend of mine asked me to put together an educational “seminar” for her about politics. She wanted a nonpartisan presentation of all the major issues and where the candidates stood on them so that she’d be ready to make an informed decision come time to cast her vote. I began preparing for this “seminar” tonight by going to each candidate’s website and reading what they had to say in the Issues sections. I began with Defense. And as I began to copy and paste key passages from barackobama.com to a Word document for later reference, I started to think that something was off.

Until tonight, I was under the impression that Obama wanted to cut defense spending. I got under this impression because that’s what he’s said. One video clip I saw on YouTube captured him saying “I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.”

But then his website says things like, “we must build up our special operations forces, civil affairs, information operations, and other units and capabilities that remain in chronic short supply; invest in foreign language training, cultural awareness, and human intelligence and other needed counterinsurgency and stabilization skill sets.” He says he wants to increase the size of our military, taking the Army to 65,000 troops and the Marines to 27,000 troops. He even wants to further fund weapons research, making sure that we’re keeping up with the 21st Century in terms of naval ships, missile defense, and armor. His website would have me believe that he’s totally pro-military. And that’s a Barack Obama I could support.

So where did the other guy go? The guy that who wanted to save us tons of money by jeopardizing our safety? Because it looks to me like that guy done and turned into John McCain.

The Defense plans on both the Obama and McCain websites are almost identical now. While they still disagree on the Middle East exit strategy, their general military attitudes are the same: more troops, better weapons. So I guess Obama has changed his mind again.

Oh, is THAT what Obama’s always talking about when he says, “change, change, change”? Changing his MIND? I get it now!

But seriously. While I’m not angry that Obama realized he was wrong and switched his stance, I do wonder what effect, if any, this is going to have on his economic plan. As Obama has been criticized for his proposed increases in government spending, he has been able to justify them because of what cuts he also says he’ll make. Several billion dollars of these so-called cuts were supposed to come from the defense budget. Now they’re not. So it’s a whole lot of spending and not a whole lot of cuts. Sound wise to you?

It looks to me like Obama’s got to change something. Again. Whether he returns to his anti-military ways or revokes his proposals for more and more spending, his platform as it stands now is imbalanced. If a candidate keeps trying to switch things up to make people happy, he’s got to make sure none of those people are paying close attention when he starts to spout off non-sequiturs.

Sorry, Obama. I am.