I’m a registered independent, here’s my choice for the Presidential race.
The race for who will be the next President of the United States has narrowed over the last several weeks of the campaign.
According to the University of Florida early vote tracker nearly 80.4 million have voted in this election so far with nearly 18 hours to go before the polls close in all 50 states.
The race is between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate President Donald Trump. The current Vice President and former President respectively. Both candidates have been actively campaigning in several swing states through a combination of campaign stops and advertisements on TV, YouTube, and radio. As the race became incredibly tight, and the polls suggested that this would be one of the closest elections in decades I reviewed my choices and their policies and positions.
When my ballot arrived and finally made my decision.
I’m voting for Kamala Harris.
I say this as someone who last voted for either of the major two parties in the 2008 Presidential race. Here are some of the reasons why I’ve decided to choose the Vice President and why I believe she is more than qualified to be President of the United States than a convicted felon and pathological liar.
Economic Policies
There are a lot of policies she offers which are realistic and achievable that are long overdue in our current society. For seniors home care is expensive and is not covered by Medicare under the current system. The Harris-Walz proposal to expanding Medicare to provide home care services to seniors and expanding the coverage to include vision and hearing would result in long term savings. She’ll also expand the current number of drugs Medicare can negotiate with Big Pharma from 10 to 50, which takes the financial burden off seniors and their families to help pay for prescription drugs private companies have a monopoly over. Trump on the other hand has repeatedly proposed gutting those protections and as President called for cutting Medicare for seniors and younger generations.
Her proposal also calls for expanding tax deductions for new businesses from $5,000 up to $50,000 and streamline red tape. Another policy is to scrap taxes on tipped workers who earn $2.13 an hour. Contrary to popular belief the no taxes for tipped workers is not a Trump policy, the only difference is hers would be helpful to service workers whereas Trump’s would be more beneficial to owners. In addition to that she will be offering an expansion of the Child Tax Credit from $2,000 to $6,000 for couples with kids, a tax cut for families making less than $400,000 annually. And she will be paying for this with a tax on capital gains for those who earn over $1 million a year from the current rate of 20% to 28%.
Homebuyers & Greedflation
The cost of a home has really gone up over the last twenty years and we can largely thank private equity firms and lack of affordable housing policy. Harris’s policy of providing $25,000 to first generation home buyers which while not perfect is much better than Trump’s policy of nothing. Another policy is that with monopolies of food and goods companies have been using the excuse of the pandemic and on calls with investors bragging about jacking up prices because of their monopoly. Check out this quote from the Guardian in 2022.
“We’re pretty fortunate with the pricing power we have … so we have more room to take the price as we need to. We see no resistance to date with the levels that we’re currently at.” — Brian Niccol, CEO Chipotle
50% of corporate profiteering has been responsible for inflation compared to 20% for small wage increases. Hershey’s collectively own 46% of the candy market, and with little to no competition toothpaste is still going up past $5 when it was $3.49 last year.
“Many companies are taking advantage of high consumer demand to continue to raise prices when they don’t need to,” — Jack Gillis, executive director of the consumer interest group Consumer Federation of America.
This greedflation is responsible for the price of your eggs, butter, cheese, and other groceries that you pay every month. Her plan to crack down on this compared to Trump’s shit out of luck policy makes me more inclined to vote for her.
Protecting a Women’s Right to Choose
In 2022 five right wing Supreme Court justices (three of which were appointed by Trump) ended a women’s right to have an abortion up to the end of the first trimester. Alito’s argument was that it was time to give the decision back to the states, which he neglected to mention 29 state legislatures were controlled by Republicans. They immediately implemented a six-week abortion bans angering a lot of women and pro-choice men like me as they provided no exceptions to rape or incest. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) pregnancy deaths sharply rose nationally by 11% as more bans were implemented, and in Texas from 2019 to 2022 pregnancy deaths surged by 56%.
Even worse, Texas instituted abortion bounty hunter laws to go people who help a woman go across state lines to get access to an abortion. Anyone caught can be prosecuted, charged with murder like in Starr County, and even lose their medical license which go against doctors and nurses who simply want to help their client, you know, something that’s considered a helping profession. In Mississippi where there is no exception for rape and incest a woman was charged with murder after giving birth to a still born. They used her digital footprint to prosecute her as if she robbed a store and killed customers. They also now want to ban plan B and if you’re watching porn they’ll monitor to make sure you don’t masturbate at all.
Don’t worry guys, the masturbation policy are on the case!
Oh, the hypocrisy! I thought that conservatives hated big government and wanted it out of our lives? How is this in any way shape or form conservative? It isn’t, it’s draconian and feels like a combination of the police state from George Orwell’s 1984 book and bounty hunters from the wild west era. Even if you are a conservative or a libertarian, how can you possibly justify wanting the state to monitor, track, and prosecute the autonomy of a person making their own decision?
Donald Trump and his Republican congressman and Senates will institute a national abortion ban resulting in more states becoming like Texas. Republicans go hand in glove with Trump and support his policies at the state, and can’t wait to do a Texas-style version at the national level. Kamala Harris will veto a six-week ban, and work with congress to sign Roe into law so women have access to an abortion up to the end of the first trimester.
Peaceful Transfer of Power
Donald Trump’s outright refusal and pathological lies about the 2020 election being stolen, is not the sign of a person who will leave office. All peer reviewed studies and analysis of elections from the swing states suggest that the 2020 election was free and fair. Republican secretaries of state like in Georgia went through the vote carefully and determined he lost the state, his lies fueled conspiracy theories culminating on January 6th riots who sought to kill members of congress and change the outcome. Seven members of his own party voted to impeach him for this.
I would rather have a person in the oval office that gracefully accepts defeat when they lose as the late Republican senator John McCain did and Republican Senator Romney did. They were honest and gracefully said we should rally behind the winner, something Donald Trump have never done because he’s a pathological liar. He’s also enabled the rise of anti-semitism by never denouncing white nationalists in Charlottesville’s “Jews will not replace us!” and even suggested that he needs the kind of generals Hitler had.
Vice President Harris has shown a clear laid out policy proposal during the short time which she has had to launch a campaign. I trust that she will stand up to a right-wing Supreme Court or curb the worst excesses of a Republican Congress. While I have had my issues with her on being very conservative on immigration and not taking a clear stance on the Israel-Palestinian war, she won’t promote bizarre conspiracies like pets being eaten in Ohio, drinking fish bleach cures COVID, or roll over to Putin.
For all these reasons Vice President Harris has earned my vote, because I support democracy not a dictatorship.
Link to policies: Issues — Kamala Harris for President: Official Campaign Website
