The United States of America provides the best enviroment for individuals to become successful. Our free market capitalist system has produced the single most powerful economy in world history. Our capitalist system enables people to make huge sums of money. However, there are sum in this country that prefer to penalize those making huge profits, essentailly penalizing success. This goes against our entire capitalistic system. One of the people espousing penalizing the successful is none other than Barack Obama. Senator Obama believes we should stick it to the rich in this country. The presumptive Democrat Nominee for President of the United States supports raising upper income individual income taxes to 39.6% (www.taxfoundation.org). This is despite the fact that the top 25% of income earners account for 86% of all federal income taxes, as it is. So why should we penalize (take a significantly higher percentage) those who make more money just because they make more money? When asked a question about taxes earlier this year in a Democrat Primary Debate Obama said, "I would look at raising the capital-gains tax for purposes of fairness". This is despite the fact that every time the capital-gains tax rate has been cut government revenues have increased, so essentially everyone wins. But the key word in Obama's response was "fairness". In Obama's response it didn't matter that lower capital-gains taxes are what is best for the country, rather that we should impose higher taxes on those who have used some their hard earned dollars to invest, while others either don't or can't. Obama also espouses a windfall profits tax on profits made by American based oil companies. His rationale for doing so is record profits made by oil companies like Exon. However, what company's goal is to not make a lot of money? Absolutely none, thats how many. Actually United States oil companies only make 8.3 cents of every dollar of sales. But with that aside, why should the government tax profits? That does not fit with our free market capitalist system. And if the government did enact a windfall profits tax on oil, where would it end? And what is a windfall profit anyway? By the way a windfall profits tax was tried once before (in President Jimmy Carter's Administration) and failed miserably. So under an Obama Administration being successful might not be that great.