Free Mike's Election Guide by Michael Moore Page A

quality of most people’s lives. It has probably also killed more people than Nixon did in Vietnam. It is our domestic napalm.
    So who better to issue the ban on high fructose corn syrup than the skinniest man ever to win the presidency! You
know
his mother never fed him any of this crap. Remember the Friday night during the primaries when John McCain finally released his medical records—over 1,100 pages explaining everything that’s gone wrong inside his body.
    The following week, Obama released his medical records. Total number of pages? One.
ONE!
One friggin’ page. All it was was a letter from his doctor saying he’d quit smoking and there was absolutely nothing wrong with him, never has been anything wrong with him, and—my favorite—a sentence stating that he has “no excess body fat.”
    What better leader to get us all healthy and fit again? That should be reason alone to elect this guy. And when he issues his decree banning the corn syrup, he should do it with his shirt off. And then tell everyone at home watching to “drop and give me ten.”
    It will definitely be a new day in America.
    4.The American People Will No Longer Pay More Taxes Than the French Do.
    What if the new president proclaimed on Inauguration Day, “Beginning this year, you will pay
less
taxes than the French.”
    At first, people would go, “Hey, we already pay less than the French!” One thing we all know is that not only the French, but most Europeans, pay more taxes than we do. They have to because they must pay for their socialized welfare state, and we—well, we just get up in the morning, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, every man for himself—enjoy one of the lowest tax rates in the world!
    Sadly, this is one of the biggest lies we are told. The truth is, a typical American family pays much more than a typical French family. The reason we have gotten away by claiming the opposite is that we just change the words so that we don’t call certain things a “tax.”
    A French couple with two children pays an average income tax of 22 percent; in the USA the average American couple with two kids pays 19 percent—less than the French.
    But here’s the rub. What French taxes cover and what ours cover are two very different things.
    Here’s what a French family’s income tax gets them:
    •FREE healthcare
    •FREE (or virtually free) child care
    •FREE tuition at every university, from community colleges to the Sorbonne
    •Four months minimum of maternity leave with FULL PAY
    •Mandatory 30 days vacation each year at FULL PAY
    •Unlimited sick days at FULL PAY for all citizens
    All of that—for paying just a bit more to the government. How can they afford that?
    Here’s how. They don’t invade countries. They stopped being a colonial power. They don’t let the corporations entirely run their country. They have strong unions. And the citizens will shut down the country if the government misbehaves.
    Because we don’t provide the above benefits the French get—and instead make our citizens pay for them out of their pockets—we don’t refer to these fees as “taxes.”
But that’s exactly what they are.
Taxes. We Americans each pay our
regular
taxes, and then on top of that we pay
much, much more.
    If you are paying for your own family’s health insurance, you pay an average of $12,000 a year in “premiums” (taxes), plus hundreds of dollars more in co-pays and deductibles (taxes). (If your employer pays it, that’s money you could otherwise be negotiating to be paid in WAGES; plus, even with employer-funded health insurance, you still end up getting socked with the numerous co-pays and deductibles.)
    When, as an American, you pay for your own college education, you’re paying a tax that we call “tuition, room, and board.” And if you’re still paying off your student loans, you’re paying hundreds of dollars each month in student loan payments (again, a tax that we don’t call a tax)—often well into