The Economics Plans

And now it's time to get down to business. And we're starting with the big issue, the economy. So, let's start with the candidates' positions. All information and videos are taken directly from the candidates' websites, either in part or in whole, unless otherwise noted, with minimal alteration to clarify and streamline information.

Barack Obama
 Summarized from Obama's Website

• At the time Obama took office, the economy was losing more than 700,000 jobs per month. He quickly passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which cut taxes for small businesses and 95% of working families and included emergency funding to support about 300,000 educator jobs, over 4,600 law enforcement positions and investments in the clean energy sector that supported 224,500 jobs through 2010. Through May 2012 the economy has added 4.4 million private sector jobs over 28 consecutive months of job growth.
• Obama wants to grow high-technology US manufacturing capacity and supply clean energy projects with American-made parts and equipment, which is why he's provided tax incentives to and made investments in clean energy technologies like wind turbines and advanced car batteries
• Obama launched the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a national effort to invest in technologies that will create high-quality manufacturing jobs and enhance America's global competitiveness.
• Obama signed the America Invents Act, historic patent reform legislation that will help American entrepreneurs bring inventions to market sooner, helping to create new businesses and new jobs by cutting wait times by two-thirds and help small business innovators move ideas from lab to market.
• Obama made the tough and politically unpopular decision to extend emergency rescue loans to the American auto industry, saving more than 1 million jobs and preventing the loss of over $96 billion in personal income - and the collapse of manufacturing in the Midwest. GM and Chrysler were required to cut labor costs and overhaul their business models in exchange for emergency loans, guaranteeing their accountability to taxpayers - and both repaid their outstanding loans years ahead of schedule. Today, Chrysler, GM and Ford are all profitable for the first time in years, adding shifts and facilities across the country. The industry has added 230,000 jobs since June 2009, and GM is once again the top-selling automaker in the world, posting it's largest-ever annual profit in 2011.
• Obama passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to hold Wall  Street accountable, prevent future financial crises, and end the era of "too big to fail". Wall Street reform ensures that if a financial company fails, it will be Wall Street that pays the price and not the American people, and sets ground rules for the riskiest financial speculation. Obama also enacted a Credit Card Bill of Rights to Protect consumers from unfair and deceptive practices, like over-the-limit charges and hidden costs.

Romney's Rebuttal (Summarized From Romney's Website)

• President Obama has repeatedly called to cut spending and raising taxes. But before President Obama increased the size of the federal government by increasing things like regulation, our existing tax rates were more or less adequate to pay for the smaller government we had, while President Obama seeks to make his changes permanent, which would increase the tax burden for everyone. Obama's desire to foster long-term changes to the tax code is particularly troublesome. When President Obama complains about banks refusing to lend and businesses refusing to hire, he should consider the impact of his own policies on that state of affairs. No discussion of President Obama's tax policies would be complete without a reference to Obamacare and its $500 billion in tax increases. Whenever President Obama discusses the need for more tax revenues that Obamacare is reason as it proves to be a major shake up to the economy.
• The most active regulation group in the federal government is the Environmental Protection Agency, with Obama's war on carbon dioxide, the most far-reaching environmental regulatory scheme in American history is the highest-profile effort by the EPA, who continue to issue new regulations touching on countless things that continue to drive up costs, hinder business investments and destroy jobs. In August 2011 Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal announced the results of an "unprecedentedly ambitious government-wide review" of regulations that if implemented would result in a total annual savings of approximately $2 billion, small compared to the over $9 billion in new regulatory costs proposed or implemented by the Obama administration.
• President Obama has sat on the sidelines while America's major trading competitors have been moving forward. The European Union has successfully signed agreements with nine countries and pursued negotiations with sixteen others. China has signed agreements with four countries and pursued negotiations with fifteen others. In August 2011, a group of Asian nations, including many with whom President Obama has stalled progress on trade, announced their goal to create the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement, which would include China but not the United States. President Obama has also failed in commercial relations with China, which has adopted a deliberate policy of building up its own economy by misappropriating western technology, blocking access to its market and manipulating its currency. The Chinese government facilitates this behavior by forcing American companies to share proprietary technology as a condition of doing business in China. Instead of responding forcefully, the Obama administration has acted like a supplicant.
• The first three years of the Obama administration have witnessed energy and environmental policies that have stifled the domestic energy sector. President Obama and the regulatory bodies under his control have taken measures to limit energy exploration and restrict development in sectors like oil and coal in ways that sap economic performance, curtail growth, and kill jobs. As the Obama administration wages war against oil and coal, it has been spending billions of dollars on alternative energy forms and touting its creation of “green” jobs. But these “green” technologies are typically far too expensive to compete in the marketplace since they generate little profit, which unsurprisingly has failed to create an economic boom.
• President Obama's approach to human capital is to let government take the lead, with the government pouring money into retraining programs, $18 billion in 2009 for 47 programs administered by nine different federal agencies and while seven programs account for three-fourths of the spending, 44 of the programs all have some sort of overlap with one another. Only 5 programs have had their results thoroughly evaluated since 2004, and we know little about the effectiveness, and one of the 47 programs, the Workforce Investment Act Adult and Dislocated Workers program, produced only “small to nonexistent” results. This is the kind of government waste, political horse-trading, and administrative chaos that has brought discredit on the federal government. We cannot afford to squander taxpayer money in this way. President Obama’s job retraining record is a live, ongoing demonstration of why federal spending in so many areas needs to be scaled back. 
• Since President Obama assumed office federal spending has accelerated at an unprecedented pace compared to recent history, from $3.5 trillion in federal spending in 2010 to a possible $5.6 trillion in a decade. This is entirely based on Obama's choice. One way to gauge if a government is living within its means is spending as a percentage of GDP. Since the 1950s, federal spending as a percentage of GDP has averaged 20%. When President Obama took office, it shot up to 25%, a level not seen since World War II. President Obama's insistence on a "balanced approach", a combination of spending cuts and taxes increases, would create a baseline level of spending higher than when he took office. Obama wants to move America in the direction of more taxes and more spending at a time when both are smothering the economy.

Joe Biden
Biden is a vocal supporter of Obama's economic plan, and a key member in helping Obama build it, so much so that it is called The Obama-Biden Plan on Change.gov. (From this article by Steve Clemons for the Atlantic)

Mitt Romney
 Summarized from Romney's Website

• Romney seeks to reduce taxes, spending, regulation and government programs while increasing trade, energy production, human capital and labor flexibility. Romney wants to relinquish power to states instead of trying to come up with a solution to every problem.
• Romney is calling for fundamental changes to how the federal government believes economic growth and prosperity are achieved, how jobs are created, and the government's role in these endeavors. It is a deeply conservative policy and major departure from the policies of the current administration.
• Romney says he wants to change the tax code to focus on jobs and growth by bringing down marginal rates in an effort to stimulate entrepreneurship, job creation and investment while still raising enough revenue for a smaller, smarter, simpler government where less people have more power to bring about faster change for the things they want. The Principle of fairness must be preserved in federal tax and spending policy and not single out anyone no matter how much they earn.
• Romney believes America's individual tax code applies relatively high marginal tax rates on a narrow tax base, which discourage people from working and being entrepreneurial, as well as building savings and investments, and with 54% of private sector workers employed outside corporations, individual rates also define the incentives for job-creating businesses. Romney wants to implement lower marginal tax rates that he hopes will secure economic gains from tax reform for all Americans, make a 20% cut in marginal rates across the board, maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends and capital gains, eliminate taxes for taxpayers with Annual Gross Incomes below $200,000 on interest, dividends and capital gains, eliminate the Inheritance Tax and repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax.
• Romney says the US's 35% corporate tax rate, which is among the highest of such taxes in the industrial world, is reducing the ability of America's businesses to compete in the global economy and to invest and create jobs at home, which hurt US wages, so Romney intends to cut corporate taxes to 25%, strengthen and make permanent the Research & Experimentation Tax Credit, switch to a territorial tax system and repeal the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax.
• Romney believes that regulations are a hidden tax on Americans, with the Small Business Administration giving an estimate of the administration of America costing $1.75 trillion annually, and that this is because federal agencies can issue whatever regulations they desire, and that most operate with little to no presidential oversight, resulting in an economy subject to the whims bureaucrats pursuing their own agendas who cannot be held accountable. A new regulation can suddenly transform a profitable investment into an unprofitable one by raising safety standards or minimum wages, or render employees unproductive due to things like federally mandated safety seminars, all of which produces uncertainty.
• Romney will treat regulatory costs like other costs and will establish firm limits for them and will act quickly to tear down the vast edifice of regulations on the economy and also seek to make structural changes to the federal bureaucracy that ensure economic growth and maximizing revenue remains front and center when regulatory decisions are made. Romney will also repeal and eliminate many existing laws, including Obamacare, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act, the Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act, and all other Obama-era regulations. Romney will also ensure environmental laws properly account for cost in regulatory process and that companies will be given longer lead times to comply with any environmental regulations. Romney says that moving forward might sound like a great idea, but regulatory costs need to treated like the real costs they are, and that he'll impose a regulatory cap of zero dollars on all federal agencies, require congressional approval of all new "major" regulations and reform the legal liability system to prevent spurious litigation. 
• Romney believes that free trade is essential to restoring economic growth, and that there is a need to open new markets beyond American borders on terms that work for America. As such, Romney will reinstate the president's Trade Promotion Authority, complete negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, pursue new trade agreements with nations committed to free enterprise and open markets and create the "Reagan Economic Zone" which would codify the principles of free trade at the international level and provide a way to punish countries that violate free trade policies. Romney also sees China as a major player, and that his first priority must be to put on the table all unilateral actions within American power to ensure that the Chinese adhere to existing agreements, and that if America wants to see the Chinese play by the rules then Americans must be willing to say "no more" to China. Romney also wants to increase CBP resources to prevent the illegal entry of goods into our market, increase USTR resources to pursue and support litigation against unfair trade practices, use unilateral and multilateral punitive measures to deter unfair Chinese practices, designate China a currency manipulator and impose countervailing duties and discontinue US government procurement from China until China commits to GPA.
• Romney will make efforts to safeguard the environment, but not at the cost of American jobs. The first step will be to stream line regulations to facilitate rapid progress in the development of our domestic reserves of oil and natural gas and allow for further investment in nuclear power. Other steps include creating one-stop shop to streamline permitting process for approval of common activities, implement fast-track procedures for companies with establish safety records to conduct pre-approved activities in pre-approved ares with minimal oversight, ensure environmental laws properly account for cost in regulatory process, edit the Clean Air Act to remove all oversight on carbon dioxide production, Expand NRC capabilities for the approval of alternate nuclear reactor designs and streamline the process to ensure that licensing decisions for reactors on or adjacent to approved sites, using newly approved designs, are complete within two years. According to Romney, America has been blessed with a cornucopia of carbon-based energy resources, an development of them has been a pathway to prosperity in the past and should be in the future, so he'll conduct a comprehensive survey of America's energy reserves, start using America's energy reserves, expand opportunities for resource developers to forge partnerships with neighboring countries, support the construction and fast tracking of pipelines to bring Canadian oil to America, reduce regulation of shale gas development and extraction trough processes like hydraulic fracturing. The failure of windmills and solar plants to turn significant profits also requires the need to move alternative energy funding to basic research utilizing long term, apolitical  funding mechanisms like ARPA-E.
• Romney extensive experience in both business and government, has a keen understanding of labor relations. He recognizes, as he himself has written, that “[a]t their best, labor unions have always fought for the rights of workers, and generations of Americans have been better off for it.” But he also recognizes that the interests of union management can diverge from those of the very workers they purport to serve. Romney's first step to improving labor policy will be to ensure that labor laws create a stable and level playing field on which businesses can operate by doing things like removing government hand outs. As businesses hire, they should not have to worry that any federal agencies will rewrite laws without warning, and as such Romney will appoint experienced individuals with respect for the rule of law that he can personally vouch for to NLRB, amend NLRA to explicitly protect the right of business owners to do with their capital as they see fit without government intervention, and reverse all executive orders issued by President Obama that worked in favor of organized labor instead of business owners. But Romney believes in the right of workers to join a union or to not join a union, which means hearing from both the union about the potential benefits and from management about potential costs, and being able to act on that decision in the privacy of the ballot booth. Romney will amend NLRA to guarantee the secret ballot in every union certification election, amend NLRA to guarantee that all pre-election campaigns last at least one month to ensure both sides are able to organize themselves, and support states in pursuing Right-to-Work and other "pro-choice" laws. Currently unions can use their funds to pay for lobbyist, with each election cycle unions spend hundreds of millions of dollars. In non-Right-to-Work states individual workers have little choice in what their dues fund, even if they do not support the union and its political agenda, which might create an enormously powerful interest group whose influence and priorities differ from those of the businesses - and thus with the needs of the economy, and so Romney will stop Unions from using dues to fund political actions.
• Romney sees two important objectives that America can pursue immediately to build on its workforce. The first is retraining American workers to ensure that they have education and skills to match the jobs  of today's economy. The second is to attract the best and the brightest from around the world to work in America. Romney doesn't believe the government is well equipped to retrain workers, and so he will dismantle the federal network of retraining and call for private businesses to handle retraining through education centers and on the job training while encouraging states to pursue a system of Personal Reemployment Accounts for unemployed individuals, similar to the program Romney created in Massachusetts when he was governor. To ensure that America continues to lead the world in innovation and economic dynamism, a Romney administration would press for an immigration policy designed to maximize America’s economic potential. The United States needs to attract and retain "job creators" from wherever they come. While lawful immigrants comprise about 8 percent of the population, immigrants start 16 percent of our top-performing, high-technology companies, hold the position of CEO or lead engineer in 25 percent of high-tech firms, and produce over 25 percent of all patent applications filed from the United States. As such, Romney will raise visa caps for highly skilled workers and grant permanent residency to eligible graduates with advanced degrees in math, science and engineering.
• After three years of President Obama, many now question whether we can ever return to fiscal sanity, let alone fiscal strength. A point of no return may well be approaching — a decade of huge deficits could drive our principal payments and interest rates beyond our reach while starving the economy of the capital it needs to grow. Mitt Romney has spent his career executing turnarounds in the private sector, the Olympics, and state government. He will bring to Washington the turnaround philosophy it so badly needs with clear and realistic goals because optimistic projections cannot wish a problem away, they can only make it worse. Romney's goal will be to bring federal spending below 20% of GDP by the end of his first term, in line with the historical trend, close to the tax revenue generated by the economy when healthy, and require spending cuts of approximately $500 billion per year in 2016 assuming a robust economic recovery with 4% annual growth, the reversal of the Obama-era defense cut, return non-security discretionary spending to below 2008 levels with a Day One bill that cuts non-security discretionary spending by 5% across the board and pass the House Republican Budget proposal created by Paul Ryan, "The Path to Prosperity" that would roll back President Obama's government expansion. Romney will build a simpler, smaller, more single-minded, easier to control government by repealing Obamacare, selling Amtrak, reduce and remove subsidies for The National Endowment For The Arts And Humanities, The Corporation For Public Broadcasting, The Legal Service Corporations, Title X Family Planning Funding and reduce Foreign Aid in all forms. By implementing Block Grants states and organizations would have more autonomy to spend the money they receive from the federal government as they desire, which would promote, innovation is areas such as Medicaid and Worker Retraining. Romney also wants to improve government efficiency and effectiveness by creating stricter enforcement and harsher penalties for improper payments, reducing federal employee compensation by up to 40% to match the private sector, reduce the federal workforce by 10% using attrition to make many federal employees to the work of 2 people, repeal the Davis-Bacon Act, and consolidate agencies and streamline processes to cut cost and improve results in everything from energy permitting to worker retraining to trade negotiation.

Obama's Rebuttal (Summarized from Obama's Website)
Mitt Romney ran for governor of Massachusetts promising more jobs, less debt, and smaller government. Here’s what Massachusetts got instead:

• As the nation’s economy grew and the median income rose, under Romney, Massachusetts plummeted from 36^th to 47^th out of 50 states in job creation, and the median income declined.
• Romney increased taxes and fees by $750 million per year, primarily on hospitals, nursing homes, motor vehicles, buying a house, people with disabilities and marriage, which saw an average increase of $1,227 per person, while cutting taxes for the wealthy by over $75 million.
• Romney increased Massachusetts' debt by more than $2.6 billion, resulting in more debt per person than any other state, and attempted to hide a $1 billion deficit, all of which resulted in the state's debt liability increasing every year Romney was in power.
• Romney outsourced state jobs overseas, calling companies who did so "pioneers". Romney advocate eliminating all taxes on companies' foreign profits, which would encourage companies to send jobs overseas. Romney has vetoed bills that would ban state contractors from outsourcing state work overseas, and has outsource jobs in child support enforcement, food stamps, and unemployment insurance overseas.
• In the Manufacturing sector, jobs declined at twice the national rate and was the third worst overall in the country, loosing more than 40,000 manufacturing jobs. Massachusetts' economic growth trailed the rest of the country every year Romney was governor, all while Romney vetoed more than $100 million in funding for economic development projects and the promotion of manufacturing. When Romney took office the unemployment rate in Massachusetts had been below the national average for almost a decade, but by the time he left unemployment was higher than the national average for the first time since 1995.

Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan played a key role in creating and promoting the "Path to Prosperity" republican budget proposal, and the majority of Romney's economic plan is taken directly from the proposal. (From this article by Steve Clemons for the Atlantic) Democratic opponents say that some of the items in Ryan's austere budget plan that Romney has declined to elaborate on that include items that would carve into social programs that protect the poor, such as food stamps and Medicaid health insurance, is uncompromisingly cruel and based on an ideology of tax cuts and reduced regulation that, under former President George W. Bush, caused America's current economic woes. (From this article by Nick Carey for Reuters)


Conclusion
Okay, so it looks like the Presidential and VP candidates for both parties are together on the economy, divide will purely be down party lines. From the looks of things, Obama wants to keep the government focused on creating jobs, keep Wall Street from being able to manipulate the markets to make themselves rich off the backs of other and keep Americans goal oriented, While Romney wants to reduce taxes, spending, regulations, oversight and general government involvement in addition to repealing just about every bill passed under the Obama administration to set government policy back to pre-2008 statue. Given the stark difference between the two plans I don't see any fence sitting on this issue, so tune in this Friday to see the superheroes responses.
~James