Vote your Own Best Interests

Primary elections are still happening everywhere and every day we inch closer to the elections in November. In case you were not aware of it, every single seat for Congress is on a ballot somewhere. Do you believe that important elections only occur when we elect a President? Not true, in fact not only is every seat in the House up for grabs but 1/3 of the entire Senate is as well. So perhaps you won’t vote because you can’t tell the Democrats from the Republicans and you won’t vote for a so-called 3rd party because they cannot win anyway. So you only vote for President, every 4 years. Yet, Congress passes the laws, not the President. The President can’t even introduce legislation, only Congress can.

But what difference does it make, they are all a bunch of crooks and they only pass laws that help themselves. True, so why vote? Here’s why.

They are all crooks, but they are not the same. Here is a simple metric to help you folks that don’t vote in these years when 1/3 of the entire Senate can be changed as well as the entire House of Representatives. Be selfish. Take care of you and your family. Vote for the candidates that will do something for you today, or at least during the next 2 years.

Vote for candidates that will pledge to raise the minimum wage. We will lose jobs, the opponents say. But if anyone in your family is currently making a minimum wage you know damn well they deserve better pay. Be selfish, vote you and your family a raise.

And then also make sure your candidate will support job creation. Perhaps you or someone in your family has been out of work, be selfish. Vote for the candidates that will increase jobs. Remember the guys and gals that tell you if you give rich people more money, the rich people will create more jobs? They won’t. And neither will any company that gets a tax cut. If they would do that, it would have happened already. So make sure you vote for a candidate that will spend public money building and fixing roads, improving our access to high speed internet, hiring more teachers with better training and so much more.

Don’t worry about the debt scolds. You may have heard the President and others tell you that our economy cannot be compared to your household budget. Even if you don’t believe anything President Obama says; on this, he is correct. Want proof? Look at Japan. They have been running steep deficits for the past 15 years. Why isn’t inflation a problem there? Large deficits do not create inflation, only a lack of available resources can do that. Japan leverages their oversized productive capacity to meet their resource requirements, the US is capable of doing the same. Vote for candidates that will support investing in you and your family. Be selfish.

Last of all, remember the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Its not a tale about the sins of sex. It is a message about the sins of treating strangers as different from you and your family. Another way to consider the story is as a parable for the Golden Rule. Jews state it as “Whatever is hateful to you, do not do to others”. The rest of religious and other moral teaching is commentary. Not only should we learn it, but act on it.

Think about whatever Golden Rule you follow and then vote selfishly in accordance. If all of us vote our personal best interests, we cannot, as a nation do anything but get better. If we all do better, isn’t the entire nation better off?

Vote. But vote selfishly, the way you yourself want to be treated. Let the 1% vote selfishly, after all if the 99% vote their interests, then they win.