Opinion: Manual for Romney
March 13, 2012
The above quote from Mitt Romney shows why he should and will most definitely be the nominee. He knows, as my last piece argued, that a fiscal focus is the only way for the republicans to have even a good chance at getting back the White House.
However, is it enough? I don’t think so. I think that the candidates can talk all they want and simply not win over enough voters to a fiscally conservative viewpoint. It is the responsibility of the Republican voters to do so. So, I will be doing my part by writing these articles to guide the Manual electorate in its decision in November 2012.
I know that, at Manual, the word Republican is a pejorative word. Most Manual students simply can’t even comprehend why any logical, smart person would ever vote Republican. This is so wrong, and I don’t know why this stigma has been put on conservatives. But the truth is that a Romney presidency would be much better for the vast majority of Manual students and their families than another 4 years of Obama. There are 3 simple and compelling reasons below:
1. We are kids. We will inherent the national debt burden. We want the least amount of debt possible so that we can stay alive and try to grow as a nation when we are in charge. Romney will certainly spend less money and decrease the debt more than Obama. This is the simplest and most profound reason.
2. Romney has a clean and pragmatic path to improving our nation’s education. He is for charter schools that break the cycle of failure in poor inner-city neighborhoods. He is for better teachers and more power for schools to fire bad teachers. He was governor of Massachusetts and thus governed over the “Education State” that houses Harvard, MIT, BU, BC, Tufts, etc. He knows the importance of a college education and how an educated populace can drive an economy forward. While Obama throws buckets of money into failing schools that show no improvement, Romney will be creating more paths to a good education, sending more kids to college, and working for a stronger system that can help fix itself from the inside out.
3. Manual kids and their families have an extremely high average income compared to other KY public schools. We are the 1% of the public school system, if you like it or not. Now, we aren’t millionaires either. It’s the middle- to upper-middle class groups that Republicans will be the best for. These people are the ones starting and owning businesses, paying mortgages, and paying for their kids’ college education. For the amount of money that comes into the home, a lot has to go out. Lower tax rates help the middle class the most so that you can keep more of the money that you earn and use it to better your economic situation. We have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world at 35%. Romney wants to lower this to 25% and cut out the loopholes that let only the large businesses benefit from the current tax system while ours suffer under an exorbitant tax rate.
It is very easy to blindly follow the common sense and populist sentiment of the Democrats. But, if every Manual student looked a little deeper and asked the question “Which candidate is better for me?”, many would see that the Republicans better support them. After all, American democracy only works when people vote for the candidate that would best represent them, not the candidate that would best represent other people. If the latter prevails, then the president would not represent the will of the people as a whole but solely the interests of a minority. Vote Republican Manual! This is best for us and for our generation.
Ben Wiley • Mar 19, 2012 at 1:56 am
Echoing Gao’s point, your idea that people should want to vote for a republican because of their excess of wealth is, in Harry’s perfect words, “ridiculous and awful”. I cannot fathom why this would be an argument you would want to make to others. The remainder of your thoughts were ones I found uninteresting, unnew, and forgettable, but this one stuck with me. Do you want to give people without excess wealth, i.e. those who are in the 99%, the idea that this party, these candidates, are not for them? Do you want to really pull the self-interest card? I’m the first to admit human actions are consistently driven by little else than self-interest, but we can at least allow our interests to rise a little above this petty form of self-serving.
HGao • Mar 16, 2012 at 8:56 pm
Probably no one will read this, but:
1. The only way to significantly cut debt by cutting spending at this point is cutting defense or a welfare program (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc.). Cutting defense is off the table for Republicans, so welfare it is. That will f*** over the country so much it isn’t even funny. Less debt is always good, but making the big bottom line a priority over the day to day lives of people is a terrible idea.
2. Massachusetts was a strong education state before Romney, and it didn’t vastly improve under him either. As for charter schools, their success is overwhelmingly hype and nonsense. For reference:
http://www.educationjustice.org/newsletters/nlej_iss21_art5_detail_CharterSchoolAchievement.htm
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/charter-schools/about-the-brill-story-on-chart.html
I could go on but that should be sufficient. Charter schools are NOT the way forward. You’ll note that countries like Finland, etc. do much better than the United States for pre-college education despite having primarily (or only) public schools.
3. Obama has cut taxes for the middle class. Obama has cut taxes for practically everyone but the very rich (the millionaires you say nobody at Manual are), and he’s even accepted extensions of Bush tax cuts for them. Romney is not going to be better for the middle class than Obama is, and he will certainly be worse for the poor. For that matter, there are quite a few low income students at Manual as well. Nice generalization there.
Your point, that everybody should vote for what’s best *for themselves*, is ridiculous and awful. Democracy is a system that is meant to function alright even if everybody only looks to self-interest. It’s a system that works *in spite of* and not *because of* self-interest. Your encouragement to discard altruistic motivations and concerns reeks of the oft-debunked and correctly oft-maligned Randian self-interest. Democracy doesn’t suddenly become a minority system if people care for others. That only depends on who those “others” are – and I’ll point out that in general, when people have altruistic concerns, their concerns are for the masses and those who aren’t already well-off, rather than for the rich and affluent minority.
I’m frankly not so afraid to make this dig, since I’m no longer a student: if this is post is representative of the intellectual standard of the Republican Party, I am not exactly encouraged to vote Republican.