Yielding Wealth Poll: Which Presidential Candidate Will Be Better For Your Personal Finances?
August 22, 2008 by Miranda Marquit
Filed under Finance
Right now, with the economy struggling and household budgets slowly imploding, many people are concerned with what the presidential candidates will do for their personal bottom lines. Indeed, the flap over who is a “financial elitist“, and who is more likely to understand “ordinary” Americans on a personal finances level is becoming one of the issues of the presidential race.
I’m interested in your thoughts on this: Who will better for your personal finances: John McCain or Barack Obama?
Vote below (or in the sidebar), and even leave a comment if you would like to elaborate.
{democracy:10}
Its abundantly clear that John McCain is completely out of touch with American families and their finances. The man owns 10 homes (and doesn’t even know how many he owns!) Not to mention the combined incredible wealth of the McCains, jetting around on the wife’s private jet, floating through life on his dad’s military prestige and handed down family wealth.
There is NO WAY that John McCain will be more in touch with the financial troubles of normal Americans — he’s never even been one.
I agree that he is out of touch. Obama may not be exactly in touch with the regular folks, but they seem to be more willing to learn what other people have to go through.
@Jason: McCain does have seven homes, but only lives in one–a condo in Virginia. The other homes were primarily bought by his wife and house an elderly aunt, among other relatives. Sound familiar? The Kerry’s have a similar setup. So do many other prominent Democrats (and Republicans). It seems a bit hypocritical for any of them to throw stones regarding housing.
Obama has never worked a hard day in his life. To say he understands the trials and tribulations of the common man is a miscalculation. And in regards to which one is best for our personal finances…one is for raising taxes and the other isn’t. Raising taxes in this current business cycle would be a financial disaster. One is in favor of socialistic policies, and the other is in favor of capitalism. Seems like an easy choice to me, at least from a financial perspective.
The sad truth is that neither candidate is the most qualified to run our country, but it is what we are stuck with.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Frugal Dad! I love your blog and I think you’re great, even though we disagree on a few things ;)
One of those things I disagree with is the idea that Obama is “raising” taxes. As far as he’s said so far, he’s just planning on letting the current Bush tax cuts (which McCain thought were a bad idea at the time) expire.
@ Frugal Dad — I echo the sentiment of Miranda, thanks for weighing in.
But you’re a little off, unfortunately. I’ll try to help. Obama wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire, and he wants to level the taxation playing field. The only people who will see ANY tax increase whatsoever are the ones who make over $600,000 per year. Is that you? If not, in almost every other tax bracket Obama’s CUTTING taxes, and the tax cuts are greater than the one’s McCain pledges. In fact McCain pledges to decrease taxes the most for the people who make the most. So the ones that would be hurt the least (if at all) by tax increases, are actually getting cuts. I understand your sentiment about raising taxes in a business cycle, but what about cutting them in a time of war? That’s an incredibly dangerous thing to do when not managed properly. Bush screwed it up, and McCain is on track to do the same thing. This may help, from the Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/5s4l7j
Thanks so much for posting the link to that chart, Jason. It really helps me understand more of the patterns involved.
Before seeing that I wasn’t really sure how I was going to be affected!
I agree Jenny. A visualization is usually much better. Does the visualization change who you would vote for?
Reaganomics has run its course, and the standard of living in America has been going south for a while now. Free markets are not the cure for all economic ills. It time for a change.
I tried posting a comment a few days ago, but it was not published. Do you only publish pro Obama comments?
@tom Please note that FrugalDad certainly is not pro-Obama. And if you check out others of my posts (notably this one: http://www.yieldingwealth.com/will-barack-obama-be-good-for-your-personal-finances/), not all comments are pro-Obama. I will check through the spam comments to see if maybe yours was inadvertently sent to the Akismet filter. Another thing to be aware of is that b5 has had server issues this week, and that may also contribute comments being lost.
I do not screen comments for political content, nor for those that do not agree with me. If you are a regular reader, you know that there are several comments on various posts, that express disagreement with me.
update @tom I have spent some hours the last two days trying to find another comment from you. I have been unable to find it at all — nor have I found any record of it. I can only assume that there was some sort of server interruption on one end or the other. I invite you to re-submit if you like, or email your comment directly to me: mirandamarquit@gmail.com.
Please keep it reasonably civil and free of obscenity. (As we hope all comments to this blog are.)
small business tax dividend elimination under Obama helps small business. It helps expansion as business can be funded additionally by the owners which is better then keeping the profits on books. Today’s tax bracket for small businesses makes it very difficult to save for expansion past Dec.
A lot of start up c corps have issues with that. The other issue is really the profit tax it self which should be reduced at least if business is saving for expansion. I think even better then eliminating the small business tax dividend (which is nice on its own), the addition of reduction of profit tax would help small businesses expand.
Thank you for your interesting analysis about small business and Obama, Kia!