Get the .30-06 for your first rifle. It will work for all North American game, particularly in the lower 48 states. As you get older you may wish to accumulate more specialized rifles -- .25-06/.257 Weatherby Magnum for pronghorn hunting, .338 Winchester Magnum for elk, etc. -- but it is always a good idea to have a back-up rifle available if your go-to rifle goes down (scope goes haywire, you drop the go-to rifle out of the case on the concrete at the airport, etc.). The .30-06 is an ideal back-up rifle because . . . it will work for all North American game.

Don't get excited about the scopes that will be mounted on the rifle when you make a combo purchase. They aren't likely to put a high quality scope on the combo, so if you are choosy about your scopes, you WILL replace the scope with something better down the road. Try to figure out what the price difference is between the raw unscoped rifle and the scoped combo. If you pay more than $100 for the inclusion of the scope it probably isn't the way to go. You won't get anything out of reselling a used, cheap scope. It is just going to be money flushed down the toilet. Alternately, you can think of the money saved as a start on paying for the better quality scope.

Most rifles will do what they are supposed to do -- throw a bullet down range with acceptable hunting accuracy. The sighting system -- the scope and scope mounts and scope rings -- may be a very big factor in the useability of your rifle. If you can't sight the rifle on target, you can't make use of the accuracy of your rifle. If you buy a cheap rifle, it may make sense to spend more money on the scope than you spent on the rifle itself. I bought a Remington ADL with synthetic stock in .30-06 for about $280 at a Grand Opening of a Bass Pro shop. I had been looking around for a beater rifle for use in the rain. I realized, after looking around at some pretty dubious candidates (old military mausers from uncertain second countries such as Argentina of uncertain years), that this was probably as good as it was going to get. When I scoped the rifle I put a Leupold VX-III 3.5-10x 40 mm scope on it -- $500 for the scope, mounts, rings, and installation. This would appear to be silly, for such a cheap gun. But I want to use this as a back-up for all my hunting, and if I am using my back-up on an elk hunt and Mr BIG shows up, I don't want to be relying on a cheap scope. A cheap gun will probably still do what it is supposed to do; a cheap scope? Maybe not.