In a recent response column to my piece on Social Security, the writer suggested that I came from a wealthy background and loved to walk all over the poor to get ahead.
I thought it would be helpful to discuss how I went from being a door-to-door campaigner for the Obama campaign to actively writing against the policies of the Obama administration.
Conventional wisdom says that you become more liberal in college, and while that is true for me in the social sense, I had the opposite experience in my political worldview.
I grew up in a family that was middle-class but not comfortably so. My dad was a middle school teacher, and my mom stayed at home to raise me and my brothers. In Pensacola, Democrat is kind of a dirty word in some circles. Countless jokes were made about my family's party affiliation.
I went to rallies to increase teacher pay with my dad, and I went to the local campaign headquarters of John Kerry, where people yelled obscenities at me from their cars as they drove by. I was about as liberal as they come in the Florida Panhandle.
Upon coming to college, I supported raising taxes on the rich, protecting labor unions and expanding social programs. Then, I switched majors and started taking economics classes, and that is when my world began to crumble.
I learned about how labor unions are sometimes like monopolies, taxes generate deadweight loss and government programs often keep the poor mired in poverty. Furthermore, I met some "millionaires" and realized they weren't different from me except for a few zeros in their bank accounts.
After seeing my activity and service fees spent by SG on HBO actors and a utility bill from GRU that exceeds what my parents pay for their inefficient two-story wooden house, I began to wonder whether I might be able to spend my money better than public officials.
I started to wonder what right these officials had to spend people's money beyond the core functions of government like police, fire, roads and national defense.
Another blow to my "progressivism" came after hearing one of the four-square players on Turlington brag about how he was able to qualify for an unemployment check that he didn't need. Another friend mentioned he got a bigger tax credit from his work at a grocery store than he earned in hourly wages. I watched as my little brother received a check from Social Security because our dad was over 65.
People all around me responded to incentives created by my government, which rewards behavior that robs the economy of growth and, thus, jobs.
One of the most shocking graphs I've ever seen is from Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw's blog. It shows that the marginal tax rate for workers making between $0 and $40,000 a year is 100 percent as every new dollar of earnings is negated by a loss of $1 in benefits.
Our government is responsible for creating a poverty trap where the impoverished are discouraged from fighting to rise up out of their condition.
Looking back on my childhood, I began to see that the teachers union that kept my dad's wages the same as other less-effective teachers contributed more to his lack of pay than anything.
Taxation was not a zero-sum game where the economy would grow no matter what we did to the wealthy. Morally, I decided that it doesn't matter whether the rich have a lower marginal utility to their spending because I simply don't have a right to their money.
It is wrong to take what is not yours, whether from theft or through the ballot box.
That is why I'm no longer a liberal.
Travis Hornsby is a statistics and economics senior at UF. His column appears on Mondays.
