Speaking to voters this week, Obama insinuated his tax policies are an attempt to "spread the wealth around." He has made it clear that he wants everyone to become successful, and I commend him for inspiring people. But, he has also made it clear he believes that if you reach a certain point of "success" it's the government's job to take your money and give it to someone "less" successful.

In other words, Sen. Obama will not raise your taxes until you become very successful. As his running mate would say, you should be "patriotic" and pay more taxes. I will make less than $26,000 this year, and I don't want a dime of someone else's money. If my fellow Americans have managed to make $260,000 instead of $26,000, God Bless them, and God bless the country they live in. I don't want a government that dramatically raises their taxes in an attempt to "help" me.

These "very successful" people are responsible for creating jobs. Who else can create jobs? When is the last time you got a job from a "poor" person? The rhetoric from my liberal friends implies people making "more money than the rest of us" are "greedy" or "wrong." This is outrageous. Some "rich" people are greedy, but they are still the one's that employ the American workforce and create new jobs for tomorrow.

Raising their taxes is a very poor idea in a volatile economy like ours. If I become a small business owner and my taxes go up, that hurts my ability to give my employees a raise, hire new workers, and expand my business.

Sen. Obama's plan is simply a thinly veiled form of socialism.

Jeremiah Cook
Chattanooga

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The rhetoric about spreading the wealth wears me out. The wealth of our nation has already been spread in the form of a government that provides a secure and stable society that allows all people to pursue their dreams and become wealthy and successful if they so choose to work toward those goals. This idea about recalibrating taxation should be termed lessening the pain of the burden of cost.

I will reference the article titled "Buffett talks tax reform with Sen. Clinton" by David Ellis, CNNMoney.com writer on June 27, 2007. Warren Buffett was speaking to an audience of wealthy Clinton supporters. He offered a bet of $1 million to any member of the audience to prove they paid more taxes as a percentage of their income than their subordinates. He did not have to pay out on that bet. The article went on to compare how the wealthiest pay as little as less than 20% of their income to taxes while the poor pay almost as much as 40%.

Our government has only one way to raise revenue...taxes. Our government took a cut in revenue early on during the current administration when we were left with a revenue surplus during the years of the previous administration. The tax cut made sense. Why tax the population so much when there was no need? However, the government has done a great job spending money on wars, bailouts, and a period of large government expansion which all may or may not be a good things depending on your political views. This spending has given us the largest government deficit on record. The inescapable truth of the matter is we, the taxpayers, have the burden of paying for all this spending.

We don't see an end of our wars, continue to see additional bailouts/rescue plans, and do not see our government contracting in size. There is no other choice but to increase tax revenue in order to pay down some of this debt. The world does not have enough faith in our country to let us continue indefinitely running on an ever increasing amount of credit as demonstrated by the falling value of the dollar over the last several months.

I have no problem paying my fair share of taxes because I enjoy my life with the safety and security balanced with my freedoms in this country. However, I would like to see the tax percentage of income become closer aligned between the wealthy and not-so-wealthy before the government comes knocking for more of my money. That should be fair no matter what side of the political aisle a person sits on.

The idea that money from the wealthy would be taken and used to "help" the not-so-wealthy is funny. None of the not-so-wealthy-crowd will see the first dime of this money. The money has already been spent. We all have the burden of paying it back. The question now is should the pain be equally distributed, or should the not-so-wealthy continue having bigger slices cut out of their income?

Jeremy Weldon
North Chattanooga