Presidents, Taxes and Budgets

For this week's issue, we'll look at candidates' platforms on Taxes and the Budget. Once again, 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

• President Obama has cut taxes for every working American, saving the typical middle-class family $3,600 in taxes over his first term. 
• President Obama believes no household making more than $1 million each year should pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than a middle-class family pays.
• President Obama knows we can’t simply cut our way to prosperity. His budget includes investments in education, manufacturing, and infrastructure, while brining discretionary spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy in more than 50 years .
• President Obama has put forward a specific, balanced plan of spending cuts and revenue increases that reduce the deficit by more than $4 trillion over the next decade, including $1 trillion in spending cuts he signed into law last summer as part of a deal with congressional Republicans. 

Romney's Rebuttal
Summarized from Romney's Website

• President Obama has repeatedly called for a “balanced approach,” by which we believe he means cutting spending but also raising taxes, which may sound appealing, but before President Obama exploded the size of the federal government, our existing tax rates were more or less adequate to pay for the government we needed under President Bush.
• President Obama claims he is offering a compromise by permanently increasing the size of the government, increasing the things government does, and increasing the tax burden on the American people.
• President Obama’s proclivity for fostering uncertainty about the long-term shape of the tax code is particularly troublesome. He has embraced one temporary solution after the next while rejecting permanent adjustments that would bring some predictability and stability to investment decision-making. The result is a business climate marked by hesitation.
• 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, Americans should remember that he already got them and spent them on a health care scheme that is itself proving to be hugely disruptive to the economy.

Mitt Romney
Summarized from Romney's Website

• Reducing and stabilizing federal spending is essential, but breathing life into the present anemic recovery will also require fixing the nation’s tax code to focus on jobs and growth. To repair the nation’s tax code, marginal rates must be brought down to stimulate entrepreneurship, job creation, and investment, while still raising the revenue needed to fund a smaller, smarter, simpler government. The principle of fairness must be preserved in federal tax and spending policy.
• America’s individual tax code applies relatively high marginal tax rates on a narrow tax base. Those high rates discourage work and entrepreneurship, as well as savings and investment. With 54 percent of private sector workers employed outside of corporations, individual rates also define the incentives for job-creating businesses. Lower marginal tax rates secure for all Americans the economic gains from tax reform.
• Make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates
• Maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends, and capital gains
• Eliminate taxes for taxpayers with AGI below $200,000 on interest, dividends, and capital gains
• Eliminate the Death Tax
• Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
•  The U.S. economy’s 35 percent corporate tax rate is among the highest in the industrial world, reducing the ability of our nation’s businesses to compete in the global economy and to invest and create jobs at home. By limiting investment and growth, the high rate of corporate tax also hurts U.S. wages.
• Cut the corporate rate to 25 percent
• Strengthen and make permanent the R&D tax credit
• Switch to a territorial tax system
• Repeal the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)

Obama's Rebuttal
(Summarized from Obama's Website)

• Mitt Romney would have to raise taxes on middle-class families in order to pay for tax cuts for millionaires, costing the typical American family with kids $2,000 more each year.
• Mitt Romney wants to preserve loopholes that allow millionaires like himself to pay a lower tax rate than working families.
  
• Mitt Romney would slash investments in the middle class while providing one of the largest tax cuts in history to the wealthy.
  
• Mitt Romney has refused to detail any plan for how he would reduce the deficit. Instead, he has called for $5 trillion in new tax cuts weighted towards the wealthy and a massive defense build-up with no strategic rationale, along with deep cuts to investments in the middle class.

Conclusion
So in summary, Obama is cutting taxes on the poor and middle-class, increase taxes on the upper class and invest in more of America, while Romney wants to reduce government spending and reduce taxes for businesses and upper-class.
Turn in Friday for the Superhero opinions.
~James