All across America this Tuesday voters will head to the polls to cast ballots in the most important election of my lifetime. Prior to this election, I had only voted in one other election as important as Tuesday’s. Remarkably that election happened only two years ago. 

Since then Americans have seen unemployment double from 5 percent to 10 percent. Federal spending deficits have gone from $500 billion annually to over $1.5 trillion annually. Our national debt has skyrocketed 25 percent from $11 trillion to $14 trillion. That equates to $45,000 for every man, woman and child living in America.

Is this the change we were promised?

As Central Texans, what we need to be concerned about most is bankrupting our nation. We need to worry less about a little pork. This country can no longer afford the high price of big government and ballooning deficits. As I have written in the past, a financial tsunami is headed our way. 

Just this month the British government announced that nation’s largest cutbacks with over 500,000 government jobs being eliminated. In France and all across Europe plans are under way to cut deficits to not only help fix the problem but simply survive. Entitlements consisting of public pensions, social security and health care top the list of costs and cost-cutting. 

The passage of ObamaCare is the crown jewel of liberalism in our country. The bill creates 159 new government agencies to regulate insurance and medical care for all Americans except, of course, anyone having served in Congress. Even though the majority of people legally living in this country opposed the bill, Congress passed it. Basically, the leaders of this country seem to know what is best for everyone while voting to exempt themselves from the bill for life. 

Recent passage of the financial regulation bill is another prime example of misguided government. The bill was intended to punish and regulate those responsible for the recent collapse of our financial markets. While there are some aspects of the bill dealing with derivatives that could prove beneficial, the bill mainly serves to hurt and over-regulate small community banks — the banks you and I depend on the most. There is absolutely nothing in the bill that deals with reforming Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the quasi-government agencies that were the main culprits of the 2008 bust in the housing market.

We need to lose some fat. To do so, we must trim back on the bacon. We know it smells good and tastes great but we can no longer afford to eat it. Politics as usual will no longer sustain the American Dream, only turn it into a nightmare. 

Smooth-tongued professional politicians need to be replaced by business people who have concerned themselves with making payrolls and providing employee health care, payroll taxes, sales, taxes, reporting and meeting myriad other regulatory laws heaped upon today’s businessman. 

Politicians can claim to be conservative, but voting records supersede talk, especially at election time. Voting records speak for themselves. 

Politicians have long raided the Social Security trust funds and replaced this cash paid in by employees and matched by employers with treasury IOUs, virtually turning our assets into liabilities. When confronted with this financial trickery, they reply they don’t understand accounting rules. Let’s elect a CPA like Bill Flores, who understands accounting and will replace our lost funds with hard assets and not be involved in such trickery.

Bill Flores is not a professional politician. At age 56, he understands the cherished model of the citizen-legislator who goes to Washington to render service, seek solutions, then soon returns home to live and work among the rest of us.

His conservative principles definitely rate your attention. For better or worse, if you’re a Democrat in today’s world, you must be a liberal to survive. But in today’s America, being a liberal and embracing big government is not the way of the future.

Americans must look past liberal ideology and send conservatives to Washington.

Gordon Robinson is president of Robinson Media, which owns the Tribune-Herald .