the economy: Obama vs McCain

Economic news has not been good lately. Record oil prices are hurting our economy which has evolved to rely on cheap oil - from agriculture to transportation, everything we buy is effected by oil prices. Record spikes in unemployment. A dollar nobody in the world wants. The mortgage crisis.
I am not an economist but much of the blame for these things can be put on deregulation, speculation, and free trade. Free trade is a no brainer, look at NAFTA. Free trade republican style allows corporations to take their factories and jobs to countries where wages are lower and laws to protect employees and the environment are less or non existent. When maximizing profit is your number one goal this makes sense. Corporations should be expected to cut every corner they can. Which is why we need the government to protect the public interest.
Deregulation and speculation in a variety of industries has been followed by massive fraud, market manipulation and collapse resulting in the government bailing out the corporations while the public gets screwed and the CEOs of said corporations walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars. Look at the energy market and ENRON for a textbook example (with the exception that the CEO did not walk away). But also look at the Savings and Loan collapse, the silver speculation of the 70's, the mortgage crisis now, and the price of oil now which oil execs have testified is due to speculation and market manipulation like silver and Enron in the past.

So what about McCain and Obama. McCain wants more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, further deregulation, further cuts in government programs, and more free trade (and more costly war). Basically more of what Bush has brought us. And we can see where that has gotten us. We know that the rich are getting richer - many CEOs make more in a week than some of their employees make in a week. Corporations like Chevron and Halliburton continue to make record profits, even with the demand for oil in this country going down thanks to high prices the corporations profit continue to rise. Further tax breaks for these corporations makes no sense when our government is starved for money. How many jobs have been created because of tax cuts for the rich? Is our economy booming because of it? Government spending on infrastructure would create more jobs domestically, think about it!

Further spending cuts is the classic move by those who hate government (ala Reagan). Of course cutting government spending also cuts JOBS! and this in turn hurts the economy. Cut health care for children and veterans, cut national park budgets, cut money for infrastructure, cut education, cut it all. Oh, except the military and occupation of Iraq. These same folks continue to increase military spending which has increased world wide in the past decade by 40% with the US spending over half the world military budget. In fact giving hundreds of billions in military aide to Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, ... no problem. McCain said yesterday that it doesn't matter when the troops come home from Iraq. We have military in Japan still so what's the rush. Well perhaps saving a few billion a week could help us pay for those veteran benefits that McCain recently spoke against because we could not afford them.

What about Obama? He is still defining his economic message and we will hear more on that in the coming weeks. I hope he does not move to far to the right on this issue as Clinton (Bill) did by going all free trade on us. I believe Obama will talk about free trade but doing it responsibly with a bit of environmental and job protection. We shall see. What he has said is that he will return to the taxes of Bill Clinton by repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and closing many of the republican crafted tax loop holes and give aways to the most profitable corporations in the country. The right and corporate media will no doubt label him a tax and spend liberal. Well OK (the dems need to start labeling the republicans as borrow and spend conservatives), the wealthy and corporations were not doing so bad under Clinton were they. Fact is in this country we pay far less taxes than other first world nations but we pay far more in health care, education, etc. Taxes are a far more just way to have people pay what they can. You can take a percentage of someone's income but when someone needs to buy a book for school, pay their tuition, or buy medicine it is the same price for the rich and poor alike. So tax and spend is not such a bad thing if we are spending it on the right stuff. Green jobs would be a good place to spend it!!!!!

As Obama said McCain is running for Bush's third term McCain came back by saying Obama is running for Carter's second. Hmmm let me think. Jimmy Carter foresaw the problems with oil way back when. He pushed for energy independence through renewable energy such as solar. He began government programs to give incentives to those who installed solar panels and he put solar panels on the white house. Of course the oil drenched republicans came in and removed the insentives and the panels and we now see where we are. If only we had listened to Carter we would be way less dependent of oil, we would be ahead of the game in combating global warming, and we would be like Germany and Japan are today, leaders in solar technology which couldn't be bad for jobs and our economic standing. So I will take a second term of Carter any day.

So clearly we have two different strategies on the economy. While I do not think it will be easy for Obama to fix all our problems what we DEFINITELY do not need is more of the deregulation and corporate tax cuts McCain is promising.