5 Reasons I Am Not Voting For Mitt

1. Military Spending - From the Romney campaign:

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. He will put our Navy on the path to increase its shipbuilding rate from nine per year to approximately fifteen per year, which will include three submarines 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.

This will not be a cost-free process. We cannot rebuild our military strength without paying for it. Mitt Romney 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. 

Currently, U.S. military spending accounts for 41 percent of total world military spending, making its military budget the largest in the world. The second largest is China, with only 8.2%. Apparently, this is not good enough for Mitt Romney.

The current level of U.S. government spending is both economically detrimental and unsustainable. If our president refuses to make cuts on spending that goes directly toward violence and destruction, how could he possibly justify cuts in social spending?

2. Inconsistency - During his political career, Romney has found himself on both sides of many issues, including:

- Abortion

- Gun control

- Bank bailouts

- Coporate bailouts

- Government mandates

- Climate change

When a candidate flip-flops on so many major issues, it is difficult to count on him to stand with the promises and principles of his platform throughout his entire term. The fact is, we have no way of knowing what Romney truly stands for.


3. Keynesianism - From Romney's nomination acceptance speech:

His [Obama's] trillion dollar cuts to our military will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, and also put our security at greater risk;

His $716 billion cut to Medicare to finance Obamacare will both hurt today’s seniors, and depress innovation – and jobs – in medicine. 

Here, Romney demonstrates a belief in the popular fallacy that government spending drives economic prosperity, an important tenet of Keynesianism. The late economist, Henry Hazlitt, identified this as the "Broken Window Fallacy." The logic is as follows:

A child throws a rock and breaks his neighbors window. The neighbor is then forced to pay to have his window replaced. While common sense dictates that this is a negative occurrence, a Keynesian says, to the contrary, that the broken window initiates a chain of events that lead to greater economic prosperity. The neighbor pays the window repairman. The repairman then spends the money on something he needs at a local store. The store owner then buys goods from a producer. And so forth.

However, this analysis neglects "the unseen." The neighbor has lost wealth. He would have preferred to use elsewhere (somewhere that better satisfied his needs or wants), the money that he was forced to spend on the window repair. Meaning, the money would have been spent in an area that is more economically beneficial, then went through a similar cycle.

Much like the broken window example, Romney fails to see "the unseen." He sees the money generated by government spending on military and healthcare. But, he neglects the money taken from the economy through taxes, which would have been spent by individuals in a manner that best suited their preferences. The government has effectively forced wealth into the industry that it prefers, while disregarding the choices of millions of individuals. This is what Romney calls economic prosperity.


4. RomneyCare - Romney's state-level healthcare mandate served as a model for ObamaCare. Both plans are in conflict with individual liberty, as they limit free choice by forcing citizens to purchase a plan. These plan are also based on faulty economics, which will lead to waste and increasing costs in the the health market.


5. The Status-Quo - With over 15 trillion dollars in debt, long-lasting high unemployment levels, a depreciating currency, and never-ending military conflict, it is apparent that the U.S. needs a philosophical reformation. Yet, it is difficult to see anything that a President Romney would actually change. The following is a brief list of his status-quo entities and policies that Romney would continue:

• The Federal Reserve 
• Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security 
• The War on Drugs 
• The Food and Drug Administration 
• Military interventionism 
• The IRS/national income tax 
• Wage controls 
• Barriers to trade 
• Foreign aid 
• Corporate Welfare 
• The Patriot Act/The TSA 

The only significant change proposed by Romney, that I know of, is the repealing ObamaCare, which he has said he will replace with his own plan (surely to be another big government, bureaucratic mess).

A vote for Romney is akin to saying "America is on the right path." This is something I certainly do not believe.

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I could go on. There are plenty of reasons not to vote for Romney, but these are the big 5. Any one of these, by itself, would be enough to scare me away from checking his name.

So, go vote for Obama. (Just kidding, don't do that either)