BARACK OBAMA and John McCain both reloaded their presidential campaigns this week with a renewed focus on the dire state of the nation's economy. With gasoline more than $4 a gallon, 438,000 jobs lost since January, and 3 million Americans facing possible mortgage default, you don't need a pollster to know the economy is the voters' top concern. And on the economy, as with much else, the contrast between the two candidates is stark.
McCain's week started out poorly. The Republican candidate stepped on his own message Monday by pledging that he would eliminate the country's deficit by 2013. This news obscured both his own larger economic plan and his efforts to attack Obama's.
Plus, McCain's strategy for the deficit may be his platform's weakest leg. This reflects the struggles within his own party - torn between deficit hawks who want spending cut drastically and supply-siders who want more costly tax cuts.
McCain provided few details for how he proposed to eliminate what the Congressional Budget Office says will be a $443 billion deficit by 2013 (assuming an extension of the Bush tax cuts, which McCain supports), not to mention the additional hundreds of billions in corporate and personal tax cuts McCain has proposed. Going after "pork-barrel spending" doesn't begin to cover it.
Obama contrasts McCain's "top-down" strategy with his own "bottom-up" recovery plan, focused on a middle-class tax cut, big job-creating investments in infrastructure repair and green technologies, and an immediate $50 billion stimulus package to ease the sting of rising prices. Overall, Obama's plan assumes a bigger role for government, including subsidies for college tuition, matching funds to encourage savings, and his near-universal healthcare plan.
These days no politician's economic plan can be without tax cuts, and both candidates compete over who is offering the biggest breaks, and for whom. Here again the differences are deep. McCain would cut the corporate tax rate, the capital gains tax, and the estate tax. His only new break for ordinary taxpayers is to double the child deduction, worth on average about $125.
Obama offers a $1,000 tax cut to the 95 percent of Americans earning less than $250,000 a year and would eliminate taxes on retirees earning less than $50,000. By eliminating the Bush tax cuts he would raise taxes on the top income brackets.
McCain doesn't like to hear it, but his economic plans really are an extension of Bush administration policies. Obama's decidedly are not. When all the economic mumbo-jumbo is removed, that fact remains.
