The Presidential Platforms

With the United States Presidential Election now less than a week away, this week we'll be summarizing the candidates platforms. 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

• On the Economy, President Obama wants to:
• Repeal the Bush tax cuts for households earning more than $250,000
• Lower taxes on the manufacturing industry
• Eliminate tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas
• Increase stimulus spending and tax cuts to grow the economy in the short term
• Cut spending and raise taxes on the wealthy to reduce the deficit to help the economy in the long term, which includes the creation of the Buffett Rule, which would tax individuals with incomes more than $1 million by a minimum of 3%, regardless of the source of the income.
• Maintain and possible increase stimulus spending and programs as needed
• Increase government regulation on the banking industry after all the deregulation by the Bush administration allowed Wall Street to cause the 2008 financial crisis.
• Increase prosecution on mortgage fraudsters and require full mortgage disclosure to make it harder for fraudsters to "steal" mortgages.
• Keep Social Security from privatization which would make it vulnerable to stock market fluctuation.
• On the Environment and Energy, President Obama: 
• Supports the creation of a mandatory cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions
• Created national standards for other toxic emissions 
• Has moved energy subsides from oil and coal to wind and solar
• Has continued to withhold approval on the northern leg of the Keystone XL oil pipeline over environmental concerns and the company's spotty record on preventing, containing and clearing up oil spills.
• Has forced BP to create a $20 billion spill response fund in addition to the clean up costs for the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, set a moratorium on permits for new offshore oil wells and stopped the granting of environmental waivers to oil companies
• On Healthcare, President Obama:
• Signed the 2010 healthcare overhaul bill, aka Obamacare, which calls for 
• patient protections like allowing coverage for pre-existing conditions
• not letting insurers cancel policies when patients get sick
• requiring individuals to buy health insurance or pay a fine
• Has been very openly critical of the Romney/Ryan plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system and significantly reduce its funding
• Wants to increase the number of people covered by Medicaid 
• On Education, President Obama:
• Reformed the No Child Left Behind law to better help students
• Created the Race to the Top program that has distributed billions of dollars to states that have begun to modernize their education systems
• Created a $10,000 college tax credit and increased Pell grants and other financial aid with a focus on turning community colleges into community career centers
• On Equal Rights, President Obama:
• Is the first US President to support same-sex marriage
• Pushed Congress into repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell and officially allowing gays to openly serve in the military
• Supports Roe v. Wade and criticized the Supreme Court decision that upheld the ban on partial-birth abortions
• On National Security, President Obama:
• Opposed the Iraq from the beginning and opposed further troop increases. When he was elected he ended the Iraq war on a more realistic timeline that the one the Bush administration had left
• Has seen significant gains in the Afghanistan war since taking office, including killing Osama bin Laden while he was being sheltered in Pakistan. 
• Has repeatedly called for using diplomacy and economic sanctions over military action with hostile nations like Iran, despite being rebuffed by those nation
• On Immigration, President Obama:
• Supports the creation of a path to legalization for illegal immigrants that includes learning English and paying fines
• Tougher penalties for hiring illegal immigrants
• Voted for the creation of a fence along the Mexican border
• Issued an executive order to not deport immigrants who had been brought to the US when they were under 16, are under 30, finished high school and have no criminal record

Mitt Romney
Summarized from Romney's Website

• On the Economy, Mitt Romney wants to: 
• make the entirety of the Bush tax cuts permanent
• cut taxes and regulations on businesses to encourage growth 
• cut non-security discretionary government spending by 5% to reduce deficit
• For individuals: 
• cutting marginal tax rates 20% across-the-board
• eliminate the estate/inheritance tax
• eliminate taxes on interest
• dividends and capital gains for individuals with incomes below $200,000
• repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
• For corporations:
• Romney has proposed cutting the corporate rate from 35% to 25%
• make the R&D tax credit permanent
• repeal corporate AMT 
• move to a territorial tax system where US companies will not have to pay US taxes on income earned overseas even when repatriated. 
• In order to pay for all these tax cuts, Romney has proposed eliminating all stimulus spending, certain tax deductions, such as mortgage interest deductions for second homes, state income and state property tax deductions, and has also stated there would be severe cuts to the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• Remove most regulation on all businesses in an effort to facilitate growth.
• Let foreclosures happen, with the belief that enough of them will make the market "reboot"
• Privatize Social Security to let it try to reap the benefits of the stock market.
• On the Environment and Energy, Mitt Romney:
• Opposes any carbon emissions reduction legislation saying it would stifle business and make country that don't have any environmental regulations like China more attractive and would leave states to create their own emissions standards
• Supports the Keystone XL pipeline and would fast track it's construction by minimizing government oversight
• Would maintain the $4 billion in subsidies for oil and gas companies
• Has stated that he agrees that humans contribute to global warming and wants to put together a group to investigate how much this has impacted the Earth and what might be done to remedy the problem.
• Would create a $20 billion package for energy research and new car technology with a focus on replacing green jobs with "American competitiveness"
• Would increase the number of oil platforms and re-introduce environmental waivers for oil companies
• Would give states the power to determine whether drilling or mining should occur on federal land within them
• Has close ties to the oil and gas sectors, having accepted millions of dollars in campaign donations from them.
• On Healthcare, Mitt Romney:
• Created a similar healthcare program to Obama's for Massachusetts, but has since denounced the system as "not something Americans want" and would repeal Obamacare as soon as he able with an executive order despite the $250 billion that would cost
• Wants to allow insurance companies greater freedoms like removing the limited number of insurance companies each state can have in the hopes a more diverse market will make things better for consumers. 
• Wants to reduce Medicare funding and turn it into a voucher based system to allow private businesses to offer health insurance and select their own clients.
• Wants to greatly reduce Medicaid coverage and the number of people covered, as well as hand over majority of control to the states
• On Education, Mitt Romney:
• Has generally agreed with Obama's policies
• Wants to reduce federal government involvement and significantly cut the Department of Education
• Believes that federal student aid encourages tuition to increase
• Wants to privatize the federal student loan program
• On Equal Rights, Mitt Romney: 
• Opposes same-sex marriage and wants to federally outlaw gay marriage
• Supported Don't Ask, Don't Tell and was not in favor of the repeal 
• Opposes Roe v. Wade and would attempt to overturn it if elected
• Believes states should be allowed to ban abortions, even in cases of rape per the official Republican platform
• Would ban in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments
• Would shut down Planned Parenthood and other women's health support facilities
• On National Security, Mitt Romney:
• would call for an increase in American's military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Tightening economic sanctions even further than Obama on hostile nations
• Would not rule out using preemptive military force on these countries and violating the Geneva Convention when detaining terrorists.
• On Immigration, Mitt Romney:
• Would make English the official language of the US 
• Would "turn off the magnets like tuition breaks or other breaks that draw people into this country illegally"
• Wants to force immigrants to "self-deport" by making it impossible for them to find work and comfortable living conditions.
• Is in favor of promoting legal immigration, allowing more high-skilled immigrants into the country and make migrant visas easier to obtain.

Presidential National Security

For this week's issue, we'll look at candidates' platforms on National Security. 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 kept his promise to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home.
• President Obama is drawing down our troops in Afghanistan as we transition security responsibility to the Afghan people, and is on track to responsibly end the war there in 2014. 
• President Obama made the bold decision to order a raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, eliminating the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks and the only leader al Qaeda had ever known. 
• In 2010, President Obama announced an international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear materials in four years, and has worked to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea. 
• President Obama has strengthened our alliances around the world with friends like Israel, our NATO allies, and our partners in Asia and Latin America. And he has brought together international coalitions to confront shared challenges, such as Iran’s nuclear program.

Romney's Rebuttal
Summarized from Romney's Website

• President Obama has repeatedly sought to slash funds for our fighting men and women, and over the next ten years nearly $1 trillion will be cut from the core defense budget. This budget cutting enterprise is proceeding while American troops are in combat in Afghanistan, returning from their mission in Iraq, and fighting the remnants of al Qaeda worldwide. The Obama administration’s cuts have left us with a military inventory largely composed of weapons designed forty to fifty years ago. The average age of our tanker aircraft is 47 years, of strategic bombers 34 years. The U.S. Navy has only 284 ships today, the lowest level since 1916, and our naval planners indicate we need 328 ships to fulfill the Navy’s role of global presence and power projection in defense of American security. Our Air Force, which had 82 fighter squadrons at the end of the Cold War, has been reduced to 39 today. President Obama has cut funding for national missile defense. 
•  The Obama administration is seeking to reap a “peace dividend” when we are not at peace and when the dangers to our security are mounting. This flies directly in the face of conclusions from the bipartisan Perry-Hadley Commission set up by Congress in 2010. Even before Congress had adopted its latest round of cuts and even before President Obama had proposed yet deeper cuts, the Commission warned that: “[t]he aging of the inventories and equipment used by the services, the decline in the size of the Navy, escalating personnel entitlements, overhead and procurement costs, and the growing stress on the force means that a train wreck is coming in the areas of personnel, acquisition, and force structure.”
• It is unconscionable that the men and women of America’s military must fly in airplanes that are old and unreliable, must sail in ships that have cracked hulls, or must ride in vehicles that are urgently in need of replacement — all because their government has had neither the vision to plan for their needs or the simple common sense to manage its own budget. 

Mitt Romney
Summarized from Romney's Website

• As Commander-in-Chief, Mitt Romney will keep faith with the men and women who defend us just as he will ensure that our military capabilities are matched to the interests we need to protect.
• Romney will put our Navy on the path to increase its shipbuilding rate from nine per year to approximately fifteen per year. He will also modernize and replace the aging inventories of the Air Force, Army, and Marines, and selectively strengthen our force structure. And he will fully commit to a robust, multi-layered national ballistic-missile defense system to deter and defend against nuclear attacks on our homeland and our allies. 
• Romney believes we cannot rebuild our military strength without paying for it. Mitt will begin by reversing Obama-era defense cuts and return to the budget baseline established by Secretary Robert Gates in 2010, with the goal of setting core defense spending — meaning funds devoted to the fundamental military components of personnel, operations and maintenance, procurement, and research and development — at a floor of 4 percent of GDP. 
• Mitt will also find efficiencies throughout the Department of Defense budget that can be reinvested into the force. The Department’s bureaucracy is bloated to the point of dysfunction and is ripe for being pared. In the years since 2000, the Pentagon’s civilian staff grew by 20 percent while our active duty fighting force grew by only 3.4 percent. That imbalance needs to be rectified.
• During World War II the United States built 1,000 ships per year with 1,000 people employed in the Bureau of Ships, as the purchasing department of the Department of the Navy was then called. By the 1980s, we were building seventeen ships per year, with 4,000 people in purchasing. Today, when we are building only nine ships a year, the Pentagon manages the shipbuilding process with some 25,000 people. That kind of excess must be brought to an end along with the byzantine rules and wasteful practices that riddle the military procurement process.
• The measures Mitt Romney will take include establishing clear lines of authority and accountability for each weapons system so they remain on time and on budget. He will institute shorter design and delivery cycles for weapons systems to eliminate the current practice of relying on yet-to-be-developed technologies, which creates delays and cost overruns. This will foster more realistic planning, get equipment into the field at a faster pace, and save the cost of having to keep older weapons systems in circulation.
• Romney will institute greater competition at all levels of the procurement process. And he will work with Congress to pass budgets on time — something the Obama administration has habitually failed to do — to allow the Department of Defense and defense contractors to properly plan multi-year projects without delay and disruption. These and other reforms will ensure a functioning procurement system that redirects savings into the defense of our nation

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

• Mitt Romney called the decision to bring our troops home from Iraq “tragic.”
• Mitt Romney has no plan to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan.
  
• Mitt Romney once said, “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”
  
• Mitt Romney has made reckless, unfounded claims but has not outlined any detailed policies for these issues.
  
• On a foreign trip, Mitt Romney insulted one of our closest allies—the British—right before their Olympics. And he’s spent months on the campaign trail criticizing our allies and partners around the world.

Conclusion
So in summary, Obama wants to use more diplomacy and less force to increase stability, while Romney wants to shift military spending from support personnel to front line hardware.
Turn in Friday for the Superhero opinions.
~James