By Marc Jampole
Americans in the 21st century judge their presidential
candidates on many parameters: Issues, party, character, demeanor
(presidentialness, if I may coin a phrase), trustworthiness and experience.
Often how the candidates say what they’ll do is as important as what they say
they’ll do.
Let’s set aside all other aspects of the voting decision for
a bit and focus exclusively on issues, which to a large extent means focusing
on what the political parties stand for, especially for the Democrats who seem
to be marching arm-in-arm towards a vision of government that follows and
builds upon the successes of the New Deal and Great Society. By contrast, on
some issues, Donald Trump is either to the right or to the left of the GOP
establishment, while on other issues he follows long-time Republican orthodoxy
.
As a long-time Social Democrat, I naturally favor the
platform of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. But for the purpose of this
article, I will restrain my snarky partisan comments and stick completely to
the positions that each candidate has laid on her-his website and past
statements. I will point out, however, when the candidates’ plans don’t add up
or are based on false premises or misinformation.
TAXES
Clinton: The net
effect of Hillary’s tax proposals will be to create trillions of dollars in
additional revenue for the federal government (which she plans to spend: see
below) by increasing taxes on the wealthy and ultra-wealthy. She will provide a
little tax relief for small businesses, the middle class and the poor. Key
provisions include:
·
Make people who earn $5 million or more a year
pay a surcharge tax on their income.
·
Make people who earn $1 million a year pay a
minimum of 30% of their income in income taxes, no matter how many deductions
they take.
·
Close a number of loopholes, so notorious that
many have names, such as the “Bermuda Reinsurance loophole” and the “Romney
loophole.”
·
Restore estate taxes to the higher level of 2009
and close certain estate tax loopholes.
·
Charge companies that want to leave the United
States an exit tax based on their unrepatriated earnings.
·
Create a standard deduction and streamline tax
requirements for small businesses.
·
Provide tax relief for excessive healthcare
out-of-pocket costs, childcare and caring for an elderly family member.
Trump: The net
effect of the Trump tax proposals will be to lower federal taxes for everyone,
but only a little for the middle class and poor and significantly for the
wealthy and businesses. Trump says he intends to prevent these tax cuts from
causing a greater deficit by cutting government waste, but virtually every
economic expert to weight in says that his numbers don’t add up. Key provisions
include:
·
Reduce tax brackets from seven to three, with a
lower than current marginal rate for the top bracket.
·
End both the Alternative Minimum Tax and the
2.8% tax on investment income to fund healthcare.
·
Lower corporate tax rate from 35% to 15%
·
Give companies a one-time chance to repatriate
income at a mere 10% tax rate
·
End the estate tax, which only applies to
individuals with more than $ 5.45 million in assets, or the richest 6/10ths of one
percent of the population.
THE ECONOMY AND JOBS
Clinton: Hillary
is going to use the billions of dollars she raises by taxing the wealthy to
stimulate the economy with the goal of creating millions of new jobs. The net
effect of several of her proposals will be to suppress corporate profits in
favor of more remuneration to employees. Here are major details:
·
Use grants, government contracts, tax breaks, low-interest
loans and other standard government means to invest federal dollars in
rebuilding our infrastructure of mass transit, bridges and roads, stimulate
manufacturing, increase research and development, and stimulate the development
and commercialization of clean energy.
·
Raise the minimum wage ton $15 an hour.
·
Strictly enforce trade agreements and make sure
all future trade agreements set a higher bar for U.S. job creation, which
translates to opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) as it currently
stands.
·
Use federal agencies to crack down on wage
theft, enforce overtime rules and make it easier for unions to organize and
bargain for their members.
·
Reward companies that share profits with
employees.
Trump: Trump is
selling the traditional nostrums of lower taxes and fewer regulations (which
all available research demonstrate do not work), to which he adds protectionist
trade policies. His details are fare sketchier than Clinton and a lot of what
he is proposing consists of blowing up existing agreements and structures, some
decades old. Details:
·
Review all federal regulations to see which can
be dropped. Trump wants to target environmental regulations, and in particular
restraints on coal production.
·
Renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) and other trade agreements.
·
Go after China as a currency manipulator.
·
Rescind all Obama executive orders related to
energy and the environment.
·
Resurrect the Keystone pipeline.
THE ENVIRONMENT AND
GLOBAL WARMING
Clinton: Clinton’s
environmental plans are truly impressive in their detail. She sets quantified
goals, proposes specific actions to reach those goals and integrates the plan
into creating more jobs, giving the lie to those benighted souls who
incorrectly believe that cleaning up the environment is bad for the economy.
She even takes time to talk about protecting wildlife and the traditional rural
way of life. The details provided here only scratch the surface of what Hillary
has in mind:
·
Install 500 million solar panels by the end of
her first term.
·
Reduce American use of oil by one third by
making more efficient cars, trucks, ships and boilers.
·
Cut energy waste in schools, hospitals, homes
and offices by a third.
·
Do our part in reaching the goals of the Paris Accord,
which includes reducing greenhouse gases by 40% in 2025, and 80% in 2050.
·
Protect wildlife by keeping public lands public.
·
Protect wildlife from illegal trafficking and
farm animals from cruelty or abuse.
·
Support the continued operation of small family
farms.
Trump: Donald
Trump believes that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese for
their own economic benefit. He has no proposals to combat global warming or
resource management. He has explicitly stated that he will remove the United
States from the Paris Accord.
IMMIGRATION
Clinton: Hillary
supports comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship.
She will end family detention
and close private immigration detention centers. She will let undocumented immigrants buy into
the Affordable Care Act (ACA) medical exchanges and end the three- and 10-year
bars which make the undocumented leave the country for a certain amount of time
before returning.
Trump: Perhaps his signature issue during this presidential cycle is building
a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, which he somehow believes he can get
Mexico to pay for. For the past few months, Trump has been
waffling concerning the fate of the approximately 11 million undocumented
immigrants, but the waffling has only been in tone, not substance. Even if he
claims he will deport criminals first (as if that hasn’t already been done and
be as humane as possible with those who are contributing, he remains vehemently
against a path to citizenship. He will seek to prevent immigration, and perhaps
even travel, from Muslim countries.
EDUCATION
Clinton: All of the talk this election season has focused on Hillary’s proposal
to provide tuition free education at our nation’s public colleges and
universities to families earning less than $125,000 a year. But she has a top
to bottom program that starts with preschool:
·
Establish universal preschool for all
four-year-olds.
·
Double the current investment in Early Head
Start programs
·
Provide funding to increase the teaching of
computer science in public elementary and high schools.
·
Enhance the training of teachers and raise their
salaries.
·
Double the “Build America Bonds” subsidies to
modernize school buildings.
·
Make all public community colleges free.
·
Enable current college loan debtors to
renegotiate their loans at current rates.
·
Crack down on predatory schools and lenders.
Trump: Trump has
nothing on his website about education, but he recently announced plans to
privatize all elementary and high school education, giving families money to
make unfettered choices between public or private schools, despite the fact
that recent data shows that public schools do a much better job at educating
our youth than private schools, when you factor in income, food insecurity,
learning disabilities, divorce and early childhood trauma (see The
Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools by Sarah Theule
Lubienski and Christopher A Lubienski). Trump has said nothing about education
past high school.
HEALTHCARE
Clinton: It
goes without saying, Hillary will defend the ACA from any attempts to end or
downgrade it. But beyond support of Obamacare, Hillary has laid out an
extensive health program that leaves no stone unturned in its pursuit of less
expensive, higher quality health care:
·
Implement a plan to provide
non-punitive treatment to addicts
·
Invest $2 billion a year in
Alzheimer’s research
·
Expand insurance coverage for autism
services and conduct a national autism screening program
·
Support a woman’s reproductive
rights, including the right to inexpensive birth control and abortions
·
Place a cap on out-of-pocket expenses
paid by people with HIV and AIDS and on copays and co-insurance costs paid by
anyone
·
Bring down the cost of prescription
drugs
·
Make it easier to enroll in Medicaid
·
Double the current funding for
community health centers.
Trump: Trump
pretty much follows the Republican playbook on healthcare, starting with
appealing the ACA and instituting a series of free market principles, which
will benefit the wealthy more than anyone else since the wealthy have the most
money to spend on healthcare:
·
Allow sale of health insurance policies
across state lines
·
Allow individuals to deduct the cost
of health insurance premiums and to open Healthcare Savings Accounts
·
Make federal support of Medicaid a
block grant program, which means that the states will decide what to do with
the money
·
Allow people to purchase prescription
drugs from other countries
He also now follows the GOP line on abortion.
NATIONAL
SECURITY
Clinton: Clinton
will tend to use diplomacy, economic sanctions and coalition building to
confront global hotspots, such as Iraq, Syria and North Korea, but she won’t be
afraid to use military force as a last resort. In Syria and Iraq, she will use
airstrikes and support of local armies on our side to defeat ISIS.
Domestically, she will seek to tweak our current domestic security systems,
build relationships with Muslim communities and try to pass a number of new
laws that will keep guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists, such as a
“nor fly, no buy” law and a ban on military assault weapon sales and
possession.
Trump:
Trump is both more hawkish and more dovish than Hillary. He seems to be
appealing widely to non-interventionists and seems to believe that the United
States can basically ignore the rest of the world. Yet at various times, Trump
has proposed some very aggressive actions such as walking away from our NATO
commitments, allowing South Korea, Saudi Arabia and other allies to develop
their own nuclear warhead capabilities, dropping nuclear bombs on our
adversaries, reinstituting the torture program and loosening the rules of
combat for American soldiers so they are free to hurt civilians and commit
atrocities. Domestically, he thinks keeping immigrants out—especially
immigrants from Muslim countries—will do the job. He has declared his intention
of firing most of the current senior American military staff. He says he has a
secret plan to defeat ISIS, but will give his new generals 30 days to come up
with a plan of their own, after which he will select what to do from all his
plan.
JUSTICE
Clinton:
Clinton’s focus is on making certain the police treat all citizens the same and
that our civil rights are protected. Among other initiatives, she wants to
spend $1 billion to identify and develop programs to train police officers to
recognize and overcome racial bias; add funding to the U.S. Department of
Justice unit that investigates civil rights abuses; and start a federal
matching program to make body cameras available to all local police forces. She
wants to reform the mandatory sentencing laws that have led to mass
incarceration of Black males. She proposes to invest $5 billion in job-training
programs for ex-cons and pass legislation that restores voting rights to them.
She wants to end racial profiling.
Trump:
Trump seems to think we are in the midst of a crime wave that
requires us to allow the police to get tough. He is practically the only
national American politician to want to toughen mandatory criminal sentences
instead of loosening them. His past statements have tended to exonerate police
from the use of unwarranted lethal force and blame the demonstrators against
police brutality. He is fine with racial profiling. He is also in favor of
reinstituting “stop-and-frisk” policies, which have been declared
unconstitutional.
GUN
CONTROL
Clinton:
Hillary wants to pass a large number of gun safety laws, including to expand
gun checks, revoke the licenses of gun dealers who break the law, keep guns out
of the hands of domestic abusers, other violent criminals and the severely
mentally ill, reinstate the assault weapons ban, and revoke laws that prevent
people from suing gun companies.
Trump:
Trump wants to expand the rights of gun owners, primarily by
allowing anyone with a permit to carry a gun in one state to be able to carry
it any in any state, even where concealed carry is banned. He doesn’t want to
ban any type of weapon. He has expressed ambivalence towards the national
registry: he thinks it doesn’t help protect communities because criminals would
never buy a gun directly from a registered gun dealer, but he wants states to
do a better job of putting mentally ill people on the list. He wants to allow
military personnel to carry their own personal firearms on military bases.
CAMPAIGN
REFORM
Clinton: Clinton wants to overturn the Citizens
United Supreme Court decision and pass a law making groups publicly
disclose significant public spending; until such a law passes, she will direct
all federal contractors to disclose. She wants to create a federal matching
fund program for small donations to increase the power of individuals in
elections.
Trump: He expressed an openness to campaign reform early in the year, but
there is nothing on his website and no recent statement about the issue.
There you have it: The OpEdge Notes version of how the major
party candidates stand on the major issues. For more information, the best
place to start are the candidates’ websites.
In a normal year, I
would advise readers to take a careful look at where the candidates stand
compare to their own views and weight that analysis more heavily than
personality or party.
But this year is
different.
Because of Trump’s
erratic and irrational behavior, racist comments, high propensity for lying,
attachment to the fascistic alt-right, bromance with Vladimir Putin, past
ethical and business lapses and ignorance on virtual every issue, I am asking
even the most extreme proponents of free market capitalism and low tax rates
for the well-off to vote for Hillary. The ultra-wealthy have had a pretty good
ride in this country going on 40 years now. At worst or at best, depending on
your perspective, Clinton will turn back the clock to 1975 as far as equality
of wealth and income goes (which will be a good thing for 99.5% of the
population). I know that the typical Reagan Republican will dislike that
prospect. But it’s better than a nuclear war, a deep depression, or a foreign
policy directed by the for-profit Trump organization or Vladimir Putin.
