Barack Obama: My favorite secret Muslim. 

Our president of the past four years has spent most of that time, like many politicians, being ridiculed by the opposing party. 

Despite the Republican effort, the odds are still in the president’s favor to win today’s election. Why? Because half the country still has faith in his policies and shares his ideals. 

My vote for Obama wasn’t just a vote against Romney. I happen to agree with the president on most things, socially and economically. 

Obama is pro-gay marriage, which seems to be gaining support among college-aged students from both sides of the divide. 

Let’s be honest. Those who oppose gay marriage are staving off the inevitable. In this country, we have separation of church and state. The state can’t touch the churches, but somehow the churches keep getting away with dictating federal policy. 

Obama is also the candidate who has worked to improve women’s rights in the workplace. The president supports the Paycheck Fairness Act, which dictates that women would have to make the same as their male counterparts for the same job. 

Obama is the candidate who is working to continue funding to Planned Parenthood, which, despite popular belief, is not a coal-fired baby furnace. But if it was, I’m sure it would be clean coal.

Planned Parenthood provides a multitude of women’s health services to low-income females.   

Socially, we see eye to eye. Economically, Obama’s policies make the most sense mathematically. 

When people preach the glories of trickle-down economics, all I can picture is a bunch of rich old men dressed in tuxedos, twisting their unlit cigars and adjusting their monocles, smugly saying, “I can’t believe they bought it.”

For the wealthiest proportion of our society to pay virtually no tax on the basis that capital gains aren’t actually income is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. 

Is there new cash in your pocket or more numbers in your account? If yes, then it’s taxable. 

America was founded on the hatred of tax. There would have been no revolution without taxes. 

Today, if even one new tax is proposed, people cry socialism. 

However, in the 1950s when the tax rate was roughly 50 percent   — depending on the income bracket — nobody cried socialism.

It was America’s golden age, the height of McCarthyism and the fight against the evils of communism. A socialist takeover was a real threat, yet nobody associated the relatively high taxes of the day with being part of a socialist agenda. 

Taxes were higher, yet President Eisenhower wasn’t called a socialist.

Obama is not a socialist. Democrats are not socialists. 

Romney cannot balance a deficit –– in spite of his business background –– if he has no income tax to balance with. 

And maybe for some Americans, that’s exactly what they’re looking for: a nongovernment, a literal stagnation of all progress and public services. 

Is that what we want? A confederation of states each choosing whose rights to recognize and whose to repress?

That’s not the America I want to live in. There has to be some form of federal oversight. The states are supposed to be united, not independent. 

To enjoy what the future has to offer, we cannot devolve to the ways of the past.