Youth must carefully evaluate candidates

By: Anthony Pereira / Contributing Writer

The next presidential election is just 14 months away, which will be right around the same time many of us will be graduating and finally stepping into our ever-changing economy and workforce. This is why the next election will be a key one for the youth to partake in, seen as how there is a plethora of candidates to vote for in the primaries if you are registered as a Republican. If you are a registered Democrat, then all you have to do is sit back and watch the Right-Wingers battle it out in preparation for the general election.

As we all know, President Barack Obama will be up for re-election, taking on whoever wins the Republican nomination.

There are eight serious candidates that are currently fighting for the Republican spot, most of which are trying to get the Vice President position alongside whoever wins the main nomination. This is because there are three main front runners, according to Politico and George Washington University Battleground polls. Those three are Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann. These candidates have extreme social and political views that we, as students, should take seriously when choosing whom to support.

The three main candidates, while much more charismatic than the rest, suffer from weaknesses in strategy. Many young people might not be too concerned about this issue now, but Social Security will be a great asset to our lives in the future, and Perry has been quoted as wanting to do away with it altogether. In his book, “Fed Up!” he describes Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and “unconstitutional.”

Meanwhile, Bachmann has vowed to ban same-sex marriages across the nation, which would affect members of our gay, lesbian and transgender community. Romney might be the only logical candidate for young Republicans to vote for, but he has said that he will immediately repeal Obama’s health care plan that would take effect in the next two years. This would mean that if we were struck with an illness such as cancer, and we did not have insurance, we would not be able to get the necessary treatments to keep us alive.

Herman Cain, a former economic adviser and Georgia Senate nominee, has his “9-9-9 Plan”, which basically consists of raising income taxes on everyone to 9 percent (which 50 percent of Americans do not currently pay at all, according to thebusinessinsider.com), raising the sales tax to 9 percent (which here in Dade county is 7 percent), and dropping the corporate tax to 9 percent (which varies from 20 to 35 percent). With two tax drops, this is a plan that only benefits the highest income earners of the nation.

Ron Paul, current Texas congressman and famed Libertarian, is another interesting candidate. He is very popular among liberals for being against all of our wars, but he only feels that way because of his extreme views on how small government should be. We would be stepping into a job environment with no centralized safety regulation system if it were up to Paul.

We have many decisions to make in our lives, and a major one is whom we elect as our leader. For those who have lost faith in our current president, the options are not looking too bright, but at least we have options. Most of these candidates running for office will change how we live our lives in one way or another, and considering our inexperience, it would be of utmost importance to chose the one who positively impacts our lives.