Obama and McCain Economic Plans

From the Hoss's Mouth

Hoss Cents Free Financial Money Magazine provides the highlights of the economic plans of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. For comprehensive details on the implementation and characteristics of these plans, visit the respective Obama and McCain websites.

Barack Obama’s Economic Plan

Homeowner Protection:

• Protect homeownership and crack down on mortgage fraud
• Ensure more accountability in the subprime mortgage industry
• Mandate accurate loan disclosure
• Create fund to help homeowners avoid foreclosures
• Close bankruptcy loophole for mortgage companies
• Create a universal mortgage credit

Taxes:

• Provide middle class Americans tax relief
• Provide a tax cut for working families
• Simplify tax filings for middle class Americans
• Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit
• Expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit

For Seniors:

• Strengthen retirement security
• Eliminate income taxes for seniors making less than $50,000
• Create automatic workplace pensions
• Expand retirement savings incentives for working families

Credit Cards:

• Address predatory credit card practices
• Create a credit card rating system to improve disclosure
• Establish a credit card bill of rights to protect consumers
• Ban unilateral changes
  
• Apply interest rate increases only to future debt
• Prohibit interest on fees
• Prohibit “Universal Defaults”
• Require prompt and fair crediting of cardholder payments

Stimulate Economic Growth:

• Fix the health care crisis in America
  
• Invest in U.S. manufacturing
• Create new job training programs for clean technologies
• Boost the renewable energy sector and create new jobs
• Fight for fair trade
• Invest in the Sciences
• Make the Research & Development Tax Credit permanent
• Deploy "Next-Generation Broadband"
• Improve transparency in the market
• Investigate potential conflict of interest between credit rating agencies and financial institutions

John McCain’s Economic Plan

Bring the budget to balance by 2013 with a three-step process:

1. Provide For Reasonable economic growth

• Low individual tax rates
• Low tax rates on dividends and capital gains
• Minimize expensive mandates
• Keep jobs here
• Lower corporate tax rate
• Improve investment and research incentives
• Reduce federal borrowing

2. Institute comprehensive spending controls

• One-year spending pause; freeze non-defense, non-veterans discretionary spending
  
• Comprehensive review of all spending programs
• Take back earmark funds

3. Eliminating wasteful spending

• Stop earmarks, pork-barrel spending, and waste
• Eliminate broken government programs
• Reform civil service system
• Reform procurement programs
  
• Reform Social Security:
• Control Medicare growth

The Lexington Project highlights:

• Increase domestic exploration of oil and natural gas
• Build 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030
• Research that will allow the clean use of coal

Controlling health care costs:

• Provide $5,000 for health insurance to every American family
• Safe re-importation of drugs and faster introduction of generic drugs
• Federal research into treating and curing chronic disease
• Coordinated care
• Greater access and convenience
• Information technology improvement
• Reform the payment systems in Medicaid and Medicare
• Promote the availability of smoking cessation programs
• Improve transparency
• Provide Tort Reform

Taxes:

• Keep tax rates low
• Keep the top tax rate at 35 percent
• Maintain the 15 percent rates on dividends and capital gains
• Phase-out the Alternative Minimum Tax
• Cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent
• Allow first-year deduction or "expensing" of equipment and technology investments
• Establish permanent tax credit equal to 10 percent of wages spent on Research & Development
• Reduce the estate tax rate to 15 percent with a $10 million exemption
• Ban Internet taxes
• Ban new cell phone taxes

Immediate relief for American families:

• Suspend the 18.4-cent federal gas tax and 24.4-cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day
• Implement policies to increase the value of the dollar
• Repeal tax on imported sugar-based ethanol
• Roll back corn-based ethanol mandates
• “Home Plan” to assist those caught in the mortgage crisis
• Propose a student loan continuity plan

Mrs. Hoss insists that The Hoss provide links for those of you who would like to explore these economic plans in depth, so here they are:

Barack Obama Economic Plan

John McCain Economic Plan


Stay on track,

The Hoss

Hoss Cents Free Financial Money Magazine Next Post:Canadian Federal Election
Previous Post: Obama and McCain Health Care Plan