First posted as comment to Blackhedd’s diary. Still working on it

My friends, my name is John McCain and I seek your vote as the next President of the United States.

My opponent has been giving speeches pointing out that house prices, retirement plan values, the number of jobs and consumer confidence have been falling. They are and they have been.

His conclusion is this is all the fault of my party, my President and would be continued by my Presidency. His plan to repair things is focused on raising income and estate taxes on those at the upper ends of success and wealth, and handing those funds to those at the bottom ends.

Before I address what I would do about the very real problems we have, let’s talk for a few minutes about the implications of following his plans. Mr. Obama may have been trained as a lawyer, but he apparently skipped economics classes on his way through two colleges and a law school.

Nor has he studied much history.

This is what he had to say about our Constitution “the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.”

Is there any secret, my friends, why in the two and a quarter centuries since this nation was founded and that Constitution was accepted, we became not only the largest, strongest, safest nation this planet has ever known? No.

What our constitution gave each of us was the freedom to live where we want, to try whatever challenge we wanted, to make of ourselves whatever we could with the God given abilities, the ambition and drive we have.

Why is it that in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, in China before it began to change, that their people were by and large poor? That their natural resources lay under developed? That where there wasn’t any reward for succeeding, people by and large didn’t.

That where there wasn’t any reward for starting companies, people by and large didn’t. Is there any real secret why there was never going to be an Apple started in a Russian garage, why the smartest, most talented and driven people made their way here to start out?

One after another, they have said for years and years: Only in America.

Now my opponent wants to change that.

He wants to make over America in the image of older, weaker, poorer nations.

What is it that we have that they don’t? Incentives.

How many of you have kids who are in high school? Ever see what happens when you offer a ten dollar bill for an A on that test?

Tickets to High School Musical for a completed term paper?

Now imagine what happens when you take the top students in the class and tell them that credit for their papers is going to be spread among the weaker students.

Now imagine two high schools, one on either side of town. At one, they get prizes and incentives for top performance. At the other, they take credit from the top students, giving it to the weaker ones. Why?

My opponent told Public Radio in Chicago the following: He want to be “ able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change.”

Now, just imagine that there are two sides to this state. On one side, the folks who write computer software, who argue legal cases, who do brain surgery, who fix car engines, who write books, who edit newspapers, are to be nicely rewarded for their work.

On the other side of the state, the same kind of software engineers, lawyers, mechanics, authors, reporters, are going to be told: you can’t keep as much of what you make. At some point they either wont work. Or they move.

Really, my opponent and his friends at Acorn understand this. Why do you think they give dollar bills and cigarettes in return for signed voter registrations?

Why do you think the Acorn workers have to turn in forms to get paid? Incentive to work. Ok for Acorn. But, kill the incentives for the rest of us.

Now, let’s take just a minute and address what it is that got us to such a terrible state.

It’s that we cant have everything we want without a price.

If we cut interest rates again and again and again, it does help the expansion of business. But it has costs, too.

Everybody wants the Fed to do a rate cut; it makes mortgage rates fall, houses more affordable. Inventories easier to finance.

But it also makes it harder and harder for your aunt or your mother to live on the savings she has carefully put aside over the years. Seven percent of a couple hundred thousand is 14. Two percent is four. Fourteen is a lot easier to live on than four.

For pension funds, for retirement accounts, for everyone who wanted returns on money, it got harder and harder with low rates to eke out the returns they needed. To cover the incomes owed to pensioners. For a hundred different things.

The superlow rates caused all sorts of folks to stretch to get the returns they felt they needed. Banks took on too many loans and investments, given the reserves they had.

Probably the worst example of this was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They only had about a two percent margin of error.

Now, you should be asking my opponent why it is that in the four brief years he served in the Senate, Mr. Obama got the second largest amount of campaign contributions they had made in the past 20 years.

You should ask him why it was that his friends at Acorn kept pressing on Fannie, Freddie and the nation’s banks to make loans to folks who were disadvantaged. Who didn’t have the down payments and income to cover service on the moneys they were borrowing.

It was the folks from Acorn who marched into bank meetings, thugs who insisted loans be made to folks who couldn’t pay them.

It’s the folks from Acorn who registered Mickey Mouse to vote in battleground states such as this.

And it’s the folks at Acorn who have endorsed my opponent for your next President.

And, guess what, it’s the folks at Acorn who want the government to take your money, and give it to them.

Only in America.