Being in my 20's, the most important issue for me is the national debt. I don't want the US to end up like Greece or Spain. I don't want to get stuck with the bill for our countries overspending.
I'll fix your overspending problem: slash the military down to half what it currently is (still massively more than any other military in the world), eliminate earmarks and corporate welfare, raise taxes (yes, it's pretty much essential, unless you want to eliminate spending equivalent to both the total spent on Social Security and Defence).
Also, the US won't end up like Spain for a variety of reasons: for starters unlike Spain the US didn't massively take in migrants to fuel a construction boom, and US government bonds are stable which is not the case for Spain or Greece.
Please, one of you Obama supporters, please tell me why I should trust Obama when he says he will cut the national deficit by $4 trillion? He promised to cut the deficit in half back in 2008, and instead he has caused it to grow at an even faster rate than Bush did during his 2 terms. Instead, the keep interest rates at all time lows so the Government is able to pay back the interest on $16 trillion worth of debt. Obama is no better than Bush at fixing the economy; in fact, he's worse.
I'm not really an Obama supporter (as a non-American who would vote Independent even if I was), however, most of the expenditure is from Bush policies that have carried over and the Bush tax cuts crippled revenue which hasn't helped.
Neither candidate has presented even the most framework of a plan that can conceivably bring down the national debt in any significant way any time soon -- Obama because he won't talk about cutting spending, and Romney because he won't talk about raising taxes.
You know if you just focus on getting people back to work, they will earn a salary, thus giving the government more revenue.
There is only a finite number of necessary jobs in the world (and a successful company does not employ people unnecessarily), with a growing population at some point unemployment can't really do anything other than rise.
The whole point of the free market is that it ultimately means that the people and businesses decide if there will be new jobs or not rather than governments, booms have happened under pretty much all tax policies and the same is true for busts.
This being said, people are getting back to work: unemployment is under 8% for the first time since 2009.
Taxing the rich is an idiotic idea. This isn't about everyone paying their fair share, its about fixing the unemployment problem.
Tax rates for the top bracket were over 70% for the entire golden era of capitalism when unemployment was consistently lower than it has been in decades for a period of 20 years.
The cut taxes and hope for the best strategy hasn't been shown to reliably increase the number of jobs in the country any more than any other tax plan, in the case of Bush it clearly didn't work.
Many major economic crashes of the last 100 years have been preceded by tax cuts (87 Crashes, GFC, great depression, amongst others). Cutting taxes (or raising taxes if it comes to that) hasn't got any kind of conclusive evidence to do anything either way for the economy.
Semi related, it really irritates me when people talk about "highest debt ever" and "highest deficit ever".. all that shows is that inflation (or, as some call it "growth") means that a dollar doesn't go anywhere near as far as it did in 1940.