This document provides a summary of why the author is voting for Obama over Romney in the 2012 election. It summarizes Romney's tax plan, defense spending plan, and energy policies and argues they will negatively impact most Americans by raising taxes on the middle class to cut them for the wealthy, adding trillions more to defense spending than needed, and focusing only on short-term domestic oil production. It also shows that the large federal deficit is primarily due to Bush-era tax cuts and wars, not Obama-era policies, and that the U.S. economic recovery under Obama has outperformed other nations. The author believes Obama deserves reelection to continue guiding the economic recovery.

1. Why I am Voting Obama
A former Republican, turned
independent’s views on this election

2. Why am I doing this?
• I am making this guide to show my family and
friends the effects of Governor Romney’s plan
• I support President Obama in many efforts and
disagree with him in others
– With that said, I find myself largely in agreement
when his policies are contrasted to Governor Romney
• I realize many people don’t have too much time
to spend on this stuff, so this is my effort to make
things easier
• Every source from my research is included

3. Contents
• Tax Policies
– I will show you projections (backed by hard data) on what Romney’s
plan means to you. How it will affect you and the rest of the country.
• Reckless Defense Spending
– I will show you Romney’s defense spending plan, how it compares to
what the Generals want, and how it trends.
• Very Short Sighted Energy Policies
– I will present a case for why this might be the biggest issue no one
talks about…
• The real reasons for the huge debt during the recession
– I will show graphs to show where federal dollars are being spent.
• How does our recovery look? Are we headed in the right direction?
– We are trending in the right direction in almost every facet. More
importantly, we are outpacing the rest of the world.

4. TAXES

5. Governor Romney’s Tax Plan
(Individual)
• Make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in
marginal rates
• Maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends
• 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)
• All of this must be done while maintaining revenue
neutrality (total taxes collected will remain the same,
just a different distribution)
• Source
– http://www.mittromney.com/issues/tax

6. My Research on the Plan
• The basic tenet of lowering rates while reducing deductions is a great
architecture. Unfortunately the math does not hold up.
• The plan will raise taxes on lower income families to finance tax cuts for the
most wealthy
– Romney claims this promotes growth, but historical data does not support this
– A report from the Senate sheds light on this assertion and proves it false
• http://www.dpcc.senate.gov/files/documents/CRSTaxesandtheEconomy%20Top%20Rates.
pdf
• Even so, the only way the plan can remain revenue neutral is to rely on
higher levels of economic growth than seen since WWII.
– This is very unlikely to magically happen, so the plan will likely ADD to the deficit
in any case
• The following graphs summarize the Tax Plan’s effects very well
• Sources for the following graphs:
– http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/1001628-Base-Broadening-Tax-
Reform.pdf
• For more information on the assumptions and a quick FAQ, check out this
link
– http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/1001631-FAQ-Romney-plan.pdf

7. How do the Tax Rate Cuts and Deduction
Cuts affect families?
• Base Broadening is a euphemism for deduction elimination or caps. This is not a bad idea
if done right. Unfortunately, Romney has taken several deductions off the table
• Once you include the Base Broadening (elimination of deductions), we see that families
making less than 200K receive a net tax increase, while the most wealthy see a larger and
larger decrease!!

8. How will Romney’s plan affect my income?
• The column with the blue circle shows the effect of the 20% tax cut, the green oval
shows the effect of the base broadening, and the red oval shows the net change. A
positive number means taxes go up, a negative number means taxes go down.
• When you finally look at how it affects income, one sees that a revenue neutral
proposal following Romney’s guidelines raises income levels for the top 1%, with an
emphasis on the top .1%.
• Everyone outside of the top 1% will see a net decrease in income level. You will
have more money taken away with this plan while the most wealthy pay less.

9. How does this affect the majority of
Americans? By percentage of income?
• Everyone outside of the top 5% will see a net decrease in income
level
• The top 0.1% see the largest effects of the policy, with a 4.4% gain for
income

10. The Gist
• The general plan here is to get larger cuts to the most
wealthy and rely on that wealth to spread to the lower
classes.
• Historically there is no correlation between lower tax rates
for upper income and greater prosperity. In fact, the trend
is the opposite
– The following paper shows there is no correlation between the
two
– http://www.dpcc.senate.gov/files/documents/CRSTaxesandtheE
conomy%20Top%20Rates.pdf
• Even so, can you justify financing tax cuts for the most
wealthy at the time when middle class families are
struggling? I cannot.

11. Obama’s plan
• Obama’s plan is not perfect by any means
either.
• It calls for a raise in rates to those in the two
highest rates.
• This would affect everyone making over 200k
a year.
• The rates would increase to the Clinton-era
levels.

12. DEFENSE

13. What is Romney’s Defense Spending
Plan?
• “…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.”
• Source:
– http://www.mittromney.com/issues/national-
defense

14. Four percent? What gives?
• Tying defense spending to GDP essentially
handcuffs spending to wartime levels (3.4%
currently)
• We are expected to get out of the Afghanistan
war in 2014
• This means that we will continue to spend more
money on defense, even after the end of our
wars
• How does this trend? Not well…The next few
charts tell the tale well

15. Let’s explain the next slide…
• The following chart details military spending across a
wide range of years.
– Source:
• http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/category/topic/defense_spending
• You can see the spikes for spending during our various
engagements
– Spike in 1950 for Korean War
– Spike in 1969 for Vietnam War
– Spike in 1980s for Cold War
– Slight spike in 2000’s for Iraq and Afghanistan
• Note, President Bush never included the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
in the official budget
• They were recorded as “Emergency Measures” and kept off the
books. If they were included the number would be higher than
the Korean war spike
– This is part of the reason why the deficit suddenly grew, as Obama put
the wars on the official budget on his first day of office

16. Defense Spending Trend
• The Romney Ramp up assumes it creeps up by .1% every year until reaching 4%
• The Romney Immediate plan pegs it at 4% on day one
• The Sequestration are the automatic budget cuts that the whole debt ceiling thing led to
• This results to an additional 2 TRILLION in spending OVER what the Generals want!!!

17. Seem fishy? Let’s look at reports by
different sources…
• CNN money projects the same 2 trillion addition
– http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/10/news/economy/r
omney-defense-spending/index.htm

18. Another source’s input. This one is the
CATO institute!
• Even the CATO Institute (a right leaning libertarian group)
thinks this plan is insane and corroborates the 2 TRILLION
number
– http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/romneys-$2-trillion-
gimmick
• “The most striking thing about Romney's proposal is the
staggering cost. Based on the most likely of three different sets
of Congressional Budget Office projections, defense spending
will total $637 billion (or 2.7 percent of GDP) in 2021.
Romney's plan in that same year would cost taxpayers $900
billion. Cumulative defense spending for the ten-year period
from FY 2012 to 2021, according to CBO projections, would
total $5.811 trillion. Romney's plan would cost $7.857 trillion, a
difference of $2.046 trillion.”

19. Where we are now in terms of defense
spending...
• 53 Cents of every tax dollar goes to defense
spending
• See this link for a short video detailing our
current spending
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNrRkL48
zio
• Do we really need to increase the amount of
money we spend on Defense?
• Right now we spend more than the next 16
countries combined.

20. ENERGY

21. Governor Romney’s Plan
• Empower states to control onshore energy development
• Open offshore areas for energy development
• Pursue a North American Energy Partnership
• Ensure accurate assessment of energy resources
Restore transparency and fairness to permitting and regulation
• Facilitate private-sector-led development of new energy
technologies
• His likely choice is Harold Hamm, an Oil man who holds rights to
more American Oil than anyone in the world.
– http://ethanolproducer.com/articles/9231/profiling-team-romney-
continental-resources-harold-hamm
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hamm

22. Why is this important?
• Romney's plan is focused on domestically
produced oil
• It would greatly permitting process and allow
for more drilling on federal lands
• The claim is that this will result in energy
independence for the U.S.
• There are some questions though…

23. How much oil do we have access to?

24. Seems like North America has quite a bit..
• While North American independence can be
achieved, that unfortunately does not keep us
from the mercy of the rest of the world
• Oil is a global commodity, meaning that even
if we produce more oil domestically, the price
is set by total demand.
• The growth for price of oil will be at the mercy
of increase global demand coupled with
diminishing supply…

25. Global Demand is expected to grow…Alot
• Global demand is
expected to increase
by over 50% by 2030
• This means increased
prices assuming
constant production
• How does our
production look?

26. Oil Discovery is dropping dramatically
• Global production will eventually feel the hit of decreased discoveries
• Do we want to tie ourselves to Oil, knowing that it’s days are inevitably
numbered?

27. What’s the Alternative?
• Brazil has a hugely successful Ethanol automobile
market. They transitioned to Ethanol to run their
cars after the 70’s oil shortage
– Ethanol accounts for 50% of their energy source in
their automotive market
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
• We actually produce more ethanol than Brazil!
– If legislation is passed to incentivize flex-fuel cars, we
can put a larger dent on oil imports
– Other countries will then be incentivized to increase
production, creating larger markets and availability

28. DEBT

29. How did the Debt begin to Pile on? Is it
Obamas fault?
• Most of the debt is
due to three sources
– Iraq/Afghanistan War
– Bush’s 01/03 Tax
Cuts
– Economic Downturn
• Lets look at another
version of this chart
to get the details…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/05/the-three-best-charts-on-how-clintons-surpluses-became-bush-and-obamas-
deficits/

30. Reasons for the Debt
• As can be seen, the huge
effect of the Bush Tax cuts
cannot be understated
– They were passed without
decreasing spending
– Raising Taxes during a
recession makes it larger, so
the tax cuts had to stay
• Wars are also hard to get out
of.
– Although we will be out of
Afghanistan in 2014, we will
continue to pay interest on
the debt for years
• The stimulus and TARP pale
in comparison
– They are the two smaller
blue areas just above the
gray

31. RECOVERY

32. Did the Stimulus work?
• The following few slides highlight figures from
a presentation that followed several economic
indicators before and after the collapse
– http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-that-
should-get-obama-reelected-2012-10?op=1

40. Ok, the Stimulus seems to have done
well. What about unemployment
though?
• When President Obama entered office we were
losing 800,000 jobs a month.
– That is almost a million jobs every month
– That is TWO Miami’s worth of people losing their job
every month
• The Stimulus helped reverse dropping confidence
and has resulted in a slow, but consistent growth.
• We have added jobs for 25 straight months!
– Lets look at it detailed

41. Job Record
• Notice how it mirrors the graph in slide 35
• http://www.barackobama.com/jobsrecord/

42. How do we compare with the rest of the
world? Has our recovery been slower or
faster?
• This is a graph for Unemployment. The lower the percentage the better.
• The dark blue and yellow are Europe, Red is the US, Light Blue is Japan
• http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/a-graph-that-makes-obamanomics-look-good/261249/

43. Let’s Focus on the Recovery…
• As you can see, Europe continued to
trend upwards in terms of
unemployment
• Japan is started to move down to
normal historical levels
• The US has seen the fastest recovery,
with unemployment dropping much
faster than Japan
• Overall the trend is very positive.
• Assuming we don’t hit another bump
we should be back to normal
numbers in a couple of years.

44. What about Healthcare??
• This is way too long of a topic to hold to a few slides
• Overall, our current model is unsustainable and the most
expensive in the world
– We spend 17% of GDP on Healthcare, the closest country spends
12%
• The Healthcare Law passed by President Obama is not perfect,
but it will improve access to majority of Americans
• Best of all, it is modeled after PROVEN Healthcare models
(Switzerland) that have been shown to alleviate the issues we
see in our system
• It is better to tweak the existing model than to hope for a more
patient friendly model to pop up
• For more information see this great editorial
– http://fareedzakaria.com/2012/03/19/health-insurance-is-for-
everyone/

45. CLOSING
ARGUMENTS

46. Where to we move now?
• President Obama has done a commendable job getting us
out of the recession
• Even business-friendly publications admit that the overall
job he has done has been great
• NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg backs Obama
– http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-01/a-vote-for-a-
president-to-lead-on-climate-change.html
• The most respected Business Magazine in the world, The
Economist, backs President Obama
– http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-01/a-vote-for-a-
president-to-lead-on-climate-change.html
• It is because of this that I ask you to vote for our President.
He has done a good job and deserves another four years to
continue the path