So, your big complaint about Obama is that he did not cure the Great Recession? And you believe Romney will?
Exactly what is it that Romney will do to end recession, Grant?
Goodness. Hm. where to start:
currently our tax system costs us $431 Billion annually - just to figure out how to comply with the damn thing. thats' $431 Billion wasted on paperwork. that's huge - it's fully 3% of GDP that could be plowed right back into growth instead wasted on compliance, avoidance, and paperwork. Our tax structure provides all kinds of incentives and tax loopholes for people to engage in economically unproductive behavior; shifting income, investment, wealth, and location around so as to minimize tax exposure rather than maximize productivity. To be blunt, it diverts massive amounts of wealth from productive to less (or straight up 'un') productive uses every year. Our tax code punishes people for saving and investing (which is economically beneficial) and rewards them for going into debt in order to consume (which is economically harmful). It punishes people for getting married and forming stable families in which to raise children. It discourages new business formation and investment. It encourages malinvestment and helps to feed bubbles. On top of all that, it costs us a huge amount of money to maintain. We could fight four wars the size of Iraq and Afghanistan, and still have enough left to fund the Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, NASA, and the EPA; just on the cost of compliance alone.
The Laffer center estimates that if we could just cut our complexity in half, we would gain 0.5% of extra growth every year which means it would compound over time. That's why both the Bi-Partisan Bowles Simpson plan, the 2012 House Republican plan, and the Romney plan build on the success of earlier tax reforms and strip out corporate welfare, tax loopholes, and complexities in the tax code and replace it with flatter, lower rates with minimized compliance costs and minimized ability to avoid taxes as a necessary step in stimulating economic growth. That they are revenue neutral (IE: since they cut rates only enough to make up the gain given by the stripping of the loopholes) is an added bonus - though Bowles-Simpson estimates it will get us an extra $100 Billion a year, which it suggested we should automatically peg towards debt reduction. Both of those predictions, it should be noted, are (as i understand it) scored statically; given the likely growth following that significant reduction in complexity there is a strong argument to be made that revenues would rise by considerably more than that. The growth from the loss of complexity and the loss of uncertainty would be explosive and compounding, meaning that every year the effect would be stronger.
The unemployment rate right now in North Dakota is about 3%. In oil country, even truck drivers can make six figures. We have more oil in the Rocky Mountains alone than Saudi Arabia
has; and we have even more natural gas and oil along our shorelines, and even
more coal. Energy jobs are A) blue collar jobs that B) pay significantly higher than the median wage and C)
cannot be shipped overseas, ever. The growth potentials of this are amazing, and the jobs that would be directly and indirectly created are legion. I'm a pretty pessimistic guy when it comes to our nations' fiscal state, but the growth potential in our energy sector is one of the few things that really gets' me excited. We need to make like Canada, Great Britain, and Russia, and start taking advantage of it to create decent jobs and higher living standards for our people.
Generally, Romney is a businessman. He knows how to make stuff grow, and he knows that his reelection would be dependent on him doing so. Obama is a college lecturer. He knows how to give good monologues, but the operations of the free market are a bit opaque to him, so of course he isn't going to be able to handle it skillfully.