I am 54 years old, so I have another decade or so to work. I have a good job
as a mid level construction manager for a major bank and make close to six
figures a year. I had hoped by this point I would be doing pretty good, but I
am not.

I had an ARM on my house which I fortunately got out of, but I had to
cash in all of my retirement savings a year ago to save my house. Five years
ago, I was diagnosed with severe rheumatoid arthritis. I am on a medication
that is helping control the disease and which keeps me from becoming crippled,
but the cost of this drug is $1500 per month!. My current insurance has a co-pay
on this RX of $500 per month. So between the cost of medications and my
employee share of the health insurance, I am paying over $1000 per month on medical.

I still have two teenagers at home; I do not know how I will send them to college, they better keep their grades up! My wife and I do not live
extravagantly. But with the cost of everything going up by the week, it is
getting harder and harder to make ends meet. Because of this, the economy is
the #1 issue for us, which is why we support Barack Obama.

We need a national universal healthcare system; healthcare should not
be the biggest cause of bankruptcy. We need to re-regulate the banking
industry; millions of hard working Americans should not be losing their homes on
Main Street while the
government bails out Wall Street. We need to stop giving tax breaks to the
elite who do not even need them. We need to stop giving tax breaks to big oil.
We need to stop giving tax breaks to companies that outsource our jobs to other
countries. We need to become energy independent while at the same time
protecting the environment and addressing the issue of global warming. We need
to get out of Iraq
now and stop wasting billions of our taxpayer dollars on a failed imperialistic
foreign policy that has produced no benefits to the citizens of the US.
We need to stop the wasteful borrow and spend, borrow and spend policy of the
Republicans that have put our country so far into debt we may never recover.
And who do we owe most of this money to? China,
the last major communist country in the world, somehow I find that extremely
ironic.

The challenges for the next president will be great indeed. I believe that
Senator Obama has the vision, intelligence and the abilities to accomplish what
needs to get done. McCain/Palin is just four more years of the Bush/Cheney
disaster! 8 years is more than enough!!!