My wife and I drove to New Jersey this weekend to attend a friend's surprise birthday party. It was a great time, and we're really glad we made the trip. As the party dwindled down to the last six or so guests, we all got into a political discussion. It was a pretty even split between liberals and conservatives, and the debate was lively. A couple of interesting things happened. First, despite the fact that the discussion was fairly heated for a while, nobody lost their temper, nobody cried, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody left the party thinking anyone else was evil or insane. That alone made it a novel discussion. Towards the end of the night, my wife was talking to the guy doing the most talking on the liberal side. He was well spoken, and had a lot of facts to back up his opinions regarding the Iraq invasion, which was the topic that took up most of our debate. Their discussion shifted to domestic policy, and Stacy mentioned that she had calculated how a Kerry presidency would affect our finances (as you all know, we have a small business.) The figure she came up with, after calculating Kerry's proposed removal of the Bush tax cuts and the increased taxes on "the rich," was about a 10% increase in our taxes. This essentially would put us at or above a 50% tax rate. The guy who she was talking to, who all night had been coming back strong with good arguments against Bush, looked a little limp. All he said was "well, I'll have to look that up." The reason for his sudden lack of enthusiasm? He's a small business owner too, and clearly hadn't looked into the impact of Kerry's plan on his business.

This made me wonder how many other people are so pissed off at Bush for invading Iraq that they're completely ignoring Kerry's domestic policies. I'll tell you one thing: Anyone who owns a small business that makes any amount of money needs to go to John Kerry's website and do some math. The results are sobering.

Bush wondered aloud in the debate on Thursday how Kerry would pay for all of his proposals, mentioning that there would be a "tax gap." Well, he can stop wondering how Kerry is going to pay for his plan. He's going to do it with my profits.