Politics aside, seriously, what’s your choice? For 99% of us, it’s a pretty simple answer.
Mitt Romney’s tax plan rewards companies that outsource jobs to other countries and makes it easier for them to avoid taxes.
Think Progress: ”Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s plan to overhaul the American corporate tax code would “exacerbate the worst features of our current tax system” by giving corporations more than $1 trillion in tax breaks and providing an incentive to outsource jobs and stash profits overseas, according to Seth Hanlon, the director of fiscal reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
“While the United States already provides an incentive for companies to store profits in offshore tax havens instead of investing those profits at home, Romney’s plan to shift the U.S. to a territorial tax system would make the situation even worse, Hanlon wrote in a report published today: “Gov. Romney’s proposed exemption for foreign profits would exacerbate the worst features of our current tax system. It would:
“– Enhance the tax code’s rewards for moving jobs and investments overseas
“– Provide a gratuitous windfall to some of the very companies that have already shifted jobs and profits overseas
“– Further invite the offshore tax haven abuse that deprives the U.S. Treasury of tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year”
President Obama’s tax plan provides income tax credits for companies that bring their operations back to America and a minimum tax on foreign earnings.
barackobama.com: “President Obama’s plan reduces the incentive to move operations overseas, and instead, creates a new 20 percent income tax credit that helps companies cover their moving expenses and bring their operations back to the United States. And to create a more level playing field for American businesses, the President has proposed a minimum tax on foreign earnings, which will reduce incentives for moving profits offshore.
“The choice between President Obama and Mitt Romney is the choice between two fundamentally different economic visions: President Obama would reward companies for creating jobs in America, and Romney would reward companies for creating jobs in other countries. The choice is that stark and that clear.”
This is how America works: lay-off workers and over-compensate CEOs – Verizon Communications announced last week that it would reduce its nationwide workforce by 1 percent, and if enough workers don’t accept the buyouts, it will resort to involuntary layoffs. Verizon paid chief executive Lowell C. McAdam more than $22.5 million in 2011, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of executive compensation. The company has paid its top five executives more than $350 million in the last five years. [...] In 2011, the company’s shareholders saw an 18.8 percent increase in the value of their returns. Workers, however, have not shared in those gains. Verizon eliminated 26,000 jobs over a two-year period in 2008 and 2009 — including 16,000 jobs in 2009 alone — and laid off roughly 13,000 more in 2010. At the same time, Verizon has demanded sizable concessions from workers… – 
Louisiana paper runs ad suggesting Obama and Democrats want to murder Christians – The Daily Advertiser, a Gannett-owned paper serving central Louisiana, is standing by its decision to run an advertisement today in which a far-right extremist group suggests that President Obama and Democrats are conspiring to murder Catholics and Christians. […] As with most newspapers, The Daily Advertiser says it does screen advertisements to ensure that blatantly false, overly offensive or otherwise inappropriate content is kept out of the paper. – 
Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom asked Paul Krugman if he preferred Obama’s plan over the Ryan plan. “Oh, yeah. I mean, the president — at least it’s — you know, I don’t approve of everything, but there are no gigantic mystery numbers in his stuff. We do know what he’s talking about. His numbers are… you know, all economic forecasts are wrong, but his are not… are not insane. These are… these are just imaginary.” – 
Having it both ways: a tale of two standards – Romney has been running for president pretty much non-stop for six years. He and his aides have, in other words, had a very long time to come up with compelling explanations for all of the shortcomings in Romney’s record. With that in mind, Romney’s staffers had to know that when they appeared on the Sunday shows yesterday, they’d hear questions about Massachusetts being 47th out of 50 states in job creation during Romney’s tenure. And what was their explanation? Romney inherited a bad situation, and when he left, things were marginally better. Seriously, that’s their defense. [...] Look, this isn’t complicated. Romney is trying to create a standard for success that only he’s allowed to use. [...] If Romney’s to be congratulated for inheriting an economy that was struggling but then turning things around a little, by that identical standard, he ought to be patting Obama on the back for a job well done. Indeed, the Romney campaign talking points practically sound like an Obama endorsement.– 
Is Mormonism Different Than Other Religions? – I also don’t think Romney’s religion should be ruled entirely out of bounds for discussion. He is running in a party that explicitly states there is no solid separation of religion and politics. And the current president was pummeled mercilessly for the more radical teachings of his church in Chicago. And Obama was just a member of the congregation – not a former official in the church, like Romney, whose entire identity is bound up with a very particular religion. Mormonism, in other words, should not be tackled differently than any other faith; but neither can it be completely exempted from examination in this election. When a future president puts on white robes and enters a secret Temple on a Sunday, it will be as big a cultural shift as having a black man in the Oval Office. I think Romney should pre-empt bigoted attacks with his own account of how his faith affects his life and politics. Just as candidate Obama did. – 
Romney’s refusal to take on Trump a sign of his “strength” — Anonymous Romney advisers 
Obama Wants to Break Republican “Fever” — “I believe that if we’re successful in this election — when we’re successful in this election — that the fever may break,” Obama said at a fundraiser in Minnesota. “Because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that.” Republicans may be more helpful on issues such as jobs, debt reduction and clean energy because they won’t be so concerned about defeating him at the polls, the president said. “My hope, my expectation, is that after the election — now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again — that we can start getting some cooperation again,” Obama said. [...] “2008 was a significant election, obviously. But John McCain believed in climate change. John believed in campaign-finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. There were some areas where you saw some overlap,” Obama said. “In this election, the Republican Party has moved in a fundamentally different direction.” – 
“There is no more naked celebrity in America than Donald Trump. He doesn’t do subtlety. He doesn’t do ‘thought.’ To say he has a political calculus is a wild overstatement. His strategy amounts to no more than junior high school algebra. The equation is: Trump + infantile public statement x infinite repetitions on TV and Twitter = maximum publicity for flailing Trump products and insatiable Trump ego.” — 
Hoekstra Says Feds Should Check Birth Certificates (but it’s not about Obama) – Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra (R) said he’d like to “create a federal office in Washington that would verify that presidential candidates meet the minimum requirements to hold the office,” the Detroit Free Press reports. Said Hoekstra: “This is not brain surgery. It should be an FBI person, maybe a CIA person. If you want to run for president, you’ve got to go with the proper documentation and get it certified that you meet the qualifications to be the President of the United States.”– 
New low for Fox News: Fox News produced its own 4 minute attack video disguised as a retrospective of President Obama’s first term in office and aired it as a “Fox & Friends Presents” special. […] At the conclusion of the video, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy thanked one of the show’s producers for editing together the segment “for weeks.” But it only took hours for network brass to perhaps recognize the implications of Fox News producing and airing its own attack ads, because they 
Obama’s political advisor David Axelrod dissected Romney’s record in Massachusetts between 2003 and 2007 in a campaign memo…”Mitt Romney applied the economic philosophy he learned in the private sector to disastrous results as governor of Massachusetts,” Axelrod wrote.”It’s the same formula that benefited a few, but crashed our economy in the first place and undermined security for the middle class. Massachusetts couldn’t afford Romney Economics, and neither can the American economy.” Axelrod said that under Romney, Massachusetts plunged from 36th to 47th out of 50 states in job creation, and despite promises to the contrary raised taxes and fees on middle class families and small businesses. “Meanwhile, he cut taxes for millionaires like himself, handing over more than $75 million to just 278 of the wealthiest in Massachusetts.” — 
Axelrod: A handful of plutocrats are trying to buy the United States – “There was a report this morning that the Republican Super PACs, apart from Romney and apart from his own super PAC, intend to spend a billion dollars in this campaign setting up shadow state organizations—district-wide organizations—as well as running media. So a handful of plutocrats of billionaires with a special interest agenda are going to try and buy this government in this election, and the stakes of that are pretty profound. I’m obviously concerned about the implications for our race, but we’ve braced ourselves and we’ve been talking about this for some time. It’s a concern. It’s one of my big concerns. But for congressional candidates, it’s gotta be a nightmare. We saw in the last election, in the last 3 weeks of those campaigns, Super PACs swooped in and spent huge amounts of money in the final 3 weeks to influence those congressional races and turned a lot of races with their money. I think you can anticipate that in spades this year.” – 
Wage theft complaints increased 400% in the last decade — According to CNN Money, “More than 7,000 collective actions were filed in federal court in 2011 alleging wage and hour violations under the Fair Labor Standards Act, an approximately 
The Pentagon 
Mitt Romney refuses to say George W’s name after he endorsed him in an elevator –. “I’m for Mitt Romney,” Bush had blurted out to ABC News on Tuesday as the doors of the elevator closed on him in Washington, DC where he was giving a speech on human rights. Speaking to a crowd of supporters in St. Petersburg, Florida on Wednesday, Romney would only refer to Bush as President Barack Obama’s “predecessor.” — 
Romney Fund-raising Event Hosted at Home of Morning-After Pill Executive – And Planned Parenthood is pissed. “Mitt Romney can’t have it both ways,” the president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund wrote in a statement. “The record is clear: Mitt Romney has vowed to restrict access to birth control, including emergency contraception, and undermine millions of women’s access to family planning.” Romney supporters spent $50,000-a-plate for a dinner hosted at the home of Phil Frost, chairman of Teva Pharmaceuticals, which makes the morning-after pill Plan B One-Step. – 
Mitt Romney’s Debt Speech Ignores Key Facts – ROMNEY: “America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.” THE FACTS. Hardly. Presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush ran the national debt up to $10.62 trillion, the amount it was on the day Obama took office. Today, it is $15.67 trillion, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Public Debt. So it has gone up by $5.05 trillion under Obama. That’s roughly half of the amount amassed by all the other presidents combined. In short, the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled. — 
Senate rejects budgets by Obama, Republicans — The Senate voted 99-0 against Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget request, with Democrats stressing that the vote was unnecessary because lawmakers wrote spending caps into a deal agreed last summer to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. In March, the House of Representatives rejected Obama’s budget proposal in a 414-0 vote. […] An alternative Republican plan put forward this year by Representative Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, called for balancing the budget over three decades in part by deeply cutting some social safety services and reforming entitlement programs like Medicare. The Ryan plan, too, failed to win enough votes to advance in the Senate, after passing the House one month ago. Democratic Senator Carl Levin said the Ryan plan “does not address what budget experts of all ideological stripes tell us we must address: the need for additional revenues.” Democrats have argued that there has been gridlock over a budget deal because Republicans refuse to accept higher taxes for millionaires along with spending cuts. “Rather than restore revenue, this budget is premised on the notion that high-income earners haven’t gotten enough in tax cuts,” Levin said. — 
Obama warns opponents over debt ceiling showdown — Obama hosted House Speaker John Boehner and other top lawmakers for a White House lunch where much of the discussion focused on the mounting pressure over how to unclog a fiscal logjam at year’s end, including expiring tax provisions, a looming debt ceiling, and automatic military cuts. The president demanded a “serious bipartisan approach” to avoid a repeat of last year’s crisis which pushed the country to the edge of default and led to its first-ever credit downgrade. “The president made clear… that we’re not going to recreate the debt ceiling debacle of last August,” when Republican-led congressional gridlock nearly shut down the federal government, Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney said. […] Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who attended the lunch, [said] any discussion of it would be “premature” until after the sequester takes effect or Congress takes measures to avoid it. – 
Fox News contributor Monica Crowley called the president of the United States “bigoted” for his suggestion that a name like “Barack Hussein Obama” made winning elections more challenging. [...] Conservative websites like Hot Air immediately accused the current White House resident of trying to “smear” presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s supporters as racist. [...] “It’s not fair!” Crowley said of the president’s comments. “What he meant was, I’m going to have a tough time because I have this funny name — this is the line he used in 2008 — because of my race, because of my ethnicity, because of my name. This is a man who won in 2008 with 53 percent of the vote. It was not a tight election. And to suggest the American people are somehow opposing him because of his race or his name is insulting to the American people and, quite frankly, Megyn, I think, bigoted in its own right.” – 
