Believe in America: Mitt Romney's Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth [Kindle Edition]

Romney for President (Author)

Book Description

Mitt Romney will rebuild the foundations of the American economy on the principles of free enterprise, hard work, and innovation. His plan emphasizes critical structural adjustments rather than short-term fixes. It seeks to reduce taxes, spending, regulation, and government programs. It seeks to increase trade, energy production, human capital, and labor flexibility. It relinquishes power to the states instead of claiming to have the solution to every problem.

Any American living through this economic crisis will immediately recognize the severity of the break that Mitt Romney proposes from our current course. He is calling for a fundamental change in Washington's view of how economic growth and prosperity are achieved, how jobs are created, and how government can support these endeavors. It is at once a deeply conservative return to policies that have served our nation well and a highly ambitious departure from the policies of our current leadership. In short, it is a plan to get America back to work.

Product Details

• File Size: 1411 KB
• Print Length: 172 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B005LEY5Q0
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,242 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars The labors of Hercules December 1, 2011

By William Whipple III VINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Mitt Romney has referred to this book as the definitive expression of his economic plan in the Republican candidate debates, so I decided to do some due diligence by reading it.

There are 59 recommendations in all, most of which would involve reversing policies of the current Administration. The basic thrust is to slow the big government express and cut the private sector a little slack. Some highlights follow:

TAXES (cut corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%, preserve Bush tax cuts, overhaul tax system longer term); REGULATORY (repeal Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, force regulators to consider costs of complying with new regulations, require Congressional approval of major regulations); TRADE (negotiate more trade agreements, get tough with China); ENERGY (expedite development of untapped US oil and gas reserves, ban EPA regulation of carbon emissions); LABOR (reverse NLRB effort to favor union organization vs. impartially arbitrating labor/management disputes); HUMAN CAPITAL (rationalize federal training programs and block grant them to the states, encourage immigration of well educated people with valuable skills); FISCAL (cut spending and cap it at 20% of GDP, support a balanced budget amendment).

Most of these ideas seem sensible to me, but the difficulties involved are understated in many cases and there is little discussion of how to overcome predictable objections. For example:

#Repealing Obama would take more than an executive order that support should be given to states that wanted to opt out, including offering an alternative program (none is satisfactorily described in the book) that would work better....

#It is said the first step towards "getting the federal debt under control" will be "admitting we have a problem and refusing to allow any more irresponsible borrowing." In, other words, "just say no." Fine, but how would President Romney propose to get the members of Congress on board?

No president could hope to implement more than a fraction of such an agenda, so it might have been better to focus on what Romney regards as the four or five top issues and go into more detail.

The absence of an identified author results in off putting statements like "Mitt Romney says" this and "Mitt Romney proposes" that, which detract from the book's impact.,,An account attributed to Romney would have worked better, even if most readers suspected it was ghost written.

In sum, "Believe in America" marks Romney as a competent manager versus an inspirational leader. Probably that is who he is, but it is not necessarily a recipe for electoral success. Read more ›

23 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A decently written campaign manual for Mitt Romney September 18, 2011

By Alan F. Sewell TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I just read Romney's book NO APOLOGIES. From that I concluded that Romney is more of a tactician than a grand strategist. Romney doesn't seem to have any grand vision for ending the Great Recession. Of course nobody else does either! What Romney does bring to the table is an ability to improve things at the tactical level --- to make so many individual improvements to government processes that the cumulative effect in improving our economy becomes major.

While Governor of Massachusetts, Romney seems to have improved enough aspects of state government to become very popular, despite his being much more conservative than most of the Massachusetts electorate.

This book is a campaign manual for what Mitt would like to accomplish as President. There's nothing at all radical in Mitt's agenda. It's more of a tweaking of the methods of government than revolutionizing them. Mitt wants to tweak the tax code so as to reduce the corporate tax rate. He wants to rationalize the patchwork of government regulations that impose an unreasonable compliance burden on business, but he supports reasonable, clear, and understandable regulations. He's for more free trade with Latin America and less with China. He wants to repeal Obamacare, the national version of what he did for healthcare reform in Massachusetts, and let the states do their own thing individually. He wants to reform, but not eliminate Dodd-Frank regulations on banks. He wants to reform the legal system to prevent excess damage awards. And of course he wants to develop all economical forms of energy in the USA.

IMO these are hundreds of small-potato ideas that probably don't excite many people when taken one-by-one. Nevertheless, small potatoes can be tasty. Put enough of them together and they become weighty.... I prefer this kind of incremental plan to the grandiose trillion-dollar stimulus spending programs that don't seem to have accomplished much in the way of improving our economy.

Anybody seriously seeking an in-depth understanding of Mitt Romney should read his autobiography NO APOLOGIES. Because that is written in Mitt's own words it gives a clear impression of who he is as a person and what he would like do as president. However, this book is a decently written campaign manual of Mitt's agendas. Read more ›

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars CAN SEE WHY IT WAS FREE October 26, 2012

By Daisy Teaney

Format:Kindle Edition

AS I READ THIS I COULD TELL THIS PERSON KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT RUNNING A GOVERNMENT. I CAN SEE WHY IT WAS FREE! NOT WORTH MY TIME AND NETHER IS ROMNEY! HE IS SCARY HAS NO IDEAS WILL BE ANOTHER BUSH!! MORE WARS AND LOWER TAXES FOR HIS MILLIONAIRE FRIENDS! HE DIDNT EVEN MENTION HIS MONEY INVESTED OVERSEAS!! HE DOESNT BELIEVE IN THIS COUNTRY ENOUGH TO INVEST HERE. WE SHOULDNT BELIEVE IN HIM AS A PRESIDENT! THIS REPUBLICAN IS VOTING FOR OBAMA!

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A Disappointing Belief February 16, 2012

By G. H. Joost Baarssen

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Believe in America is the more rhetorical, the less personal, the less biographical, and less balanced pendant to Mitt Romney's book No Apology: Believe in America. It also makes it, despite some more up-to-date information, the less interesting of the two. That it is less personal and biographical shouldn't come as a surprise, as it is, first of all, not written by Romney himself, and second, it is a pamphlet, a campaign manual, complemented by messages from Romney-supporters in business, industry, and government. For anyone interested in getting to know a little more about Romney the man, No Apology is the better choice.

I praise the initiative of writing a pamphlet in which ideas are relevantly summarized. The way it is distributed for free, either as a PDF, or as an eBook for Kindle should be lauded. I'm not a great fan of the book's structure, however. It should work fine in theory (a chapter on tax policy, one on regulations, one on trade, etc., and chapters subdivided in Obama/Romney dichotomies), but in practice you keep reading about the same policies over and over.

The pamphlet's main thrust, unsurprisingly, is that President Obama did about as much wrong as he could have and that a Mitt Romney as President would be about as antithetical to that as it can get. Whether that's really true I leave in the middle. For anyone hoping that this text would have anything to say on social issues, you will be left in the dark here--the title might have already given that away. Of course, the economy will, pace Santorum, be the most important subject of the 2012-elections.

With an unprecedented downgrade by S&P; "almost 46 million Americans......living on food stamps;" crippling unemployment ratings, and an average duration of unemployment that "has risen from 24.1 weeks to 40.4," Romney is more or less rightfully positioned against a president who had garnered a mythical reputation. Romney, on the other hand, is constructed as someone who will be able to fix the economy. He contributed in upgrading the credit rating of his Massachusetts--although raising taxes in 2002, before Romney was elected, may have actually been one of the key reasons [...]. And the pamphlet reminds us that when Romney was elected Governor, "the state economy was in distress and the budget was out of control." What it doesn't tell us that three Republicans (1991-2003) were Romney's predecessors.

Many of the ideas in the pamphlet disappointingly lack in content and scope. Romney likes to talk about "streamlining" and may think people credulously believe in that concept as to accept it. Yet, much remains unclear when he wants "rules affecting coal power plants [to] be streamlined to achieve the necessary environmental protection while avoiding job-killing plant closures." He wants to overhaul the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and others, which begs the question: how does he combine that with adhering to the idea of "preserv[ing] environmental gains." In essence, how, and what, and when? When Romney discusses financial regulation reform he merely points at what's wrong with Dodd-Frank, then demands deregulation, while stating that the good concepts of Dodd-Frank "must be translated into law in a way that creates a simple, predictable, and efficient regulatory system appropriate for our dynamic economy." Again, how, and what, and when? Flexible regulation practices of some sorts are needed. However, when the pamphlet claims "because foreign regulators are not likely to implement restrictions of their own, U.S. banks will be left at a competitive disadvantage" it is flat wrong. Europe has stricter financial regulation laws that are supported by clear majorities.

Now, what surprises me a little in a treatise about fixing the economy in such hard times is the amount of third rails, such as the military (or militarism as Paul would say), loopholes, and tax-increases. Why not have a sane discussion on rational cuts in defense spending. Why not have a sane discussion on the many loopholes corporations consistently find to pay hardly any taxes? Romney himself did a pretty good job on cleaning out some of these excessive loopholes during his time as Governor, now we don't hear anything of that in the Republican camp. (Actually, Gingrich in the September 12, 2011, debate when asked about these loopholes, flatly stated "I'm cheerfully opposed to raising taxes" as to `reassure' people he won't do anything about them). Has it come down to this? I agree with Romney that the tax code should be simplified, I agree that the death-tax is inane. What I do not agree on is that Republicans make people believe that an incredibly small tax raise on the very rich will be bad for the economy. They seem to have forgotten that the rate was at a one time high of over 90% from the mid 40s until the mid 60s. Even during most of Reagan's time, the rate was 50%. And yes, the poor are still waiting for the trickle-down effects from that era.

The total lack of criticism of any of President Bush's policies is daunting as well. Not a word on him, yet instead the pamphlet cites an overly incorrect statistic on debt: "It took 43 presidents 220 years [from 1789 through 2008] to accumulate $6.3 trillion of national debt." I do not wish to understate in any sense the enormous deficit and debt increases during the Obama-era, yet before he took office, the debt was already almost $11 trillion.

I'm also getting a little tired of that, by now, well-known and unproven narrative that someone from the private sector is instantly--as by magic--able to govern a country. Thus, the statement "Mitt Romney spent most of his career working in private enterprise" is a nice one, but it doesn't tell us anything. As if malpractice is non-existent in private enterprise; as if fraud is non-existent in private enterprise. If there's one thing we've learned from the crisis, it is that "corporations are people" indeed, but not in the beneficent sense Romney has it. Lest we forget, President Bush had ample experience in the private sector. And the pamphlet's statement, "with little private-sector experience, President Obama turned to the only thing he really knew: government," is about as silly as claiming that Romney as President, would use his Urim and Thummim to designate what's best for the US. Read more ›