With the election so close and politics on everyone’s mind, I wanted to share my personal story about how I started voting Republican. I absolutely respect differences of opinion and I encourage everyone to think about why they vote the way they do.

My story starts in a college economics class. The professor wrote on the board his annual salary and tax rate. He then wrote the additional salary he would make if he taught classes over the summer and the new tax rate he would then be in based on the additional income he earned.

The result was that due to earning more income and being bumped up into a higher tax rate, he would actually lose money if he worked more over the summer. Now this made no sense to me! If he worked more, then he would make less? But it was true and therefore he did not teach classes over the summer, i.e. worked less so he could remain at the lower tax rate.

This really struck me. Why would we as a country have a system in place that punishes someone if they work harder/more? It should be the opposite I thought, where people should be encouraged to work harder.

As an entrepreneur, I work countless hours, take huge risks, and make lots of personal sacrifices. If it works out that I am successful (which the odds are strongly against any entrepreneur), how much should be taken away from me in taxes?  I think this is a fair debate but I sure don’t want to be punished for working hard and being successful.

I can sum up the difference between Republicans and Democrats in a very simple way. Democrats typically favor policies of distributing wealth. Republicans traditionally favor policies of generating wealth. Both side have good intentions along with flaws but I’d rather be on the side of generating wealth because if you don’t have any wealth in the first place, then you don’t have anything to distribute.