Today, Barack Obama kicked of his economy tour in Raleigh, NC where he did not hesitate to draw lines in the sand with regard to the economy and John McCain.
![Photobucket](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/muzikal203/2564532317_129fd60dc0_o.jpg)
First, he takes a nice bite out of Bush's economic strategy:
George Bush called it the Ownership Society, but it’s little more than a worn dogma that says we should give more to those at the top and hope that their good fortune trickles down to the hardworking many. For eight long years, our President sacrificed investments in health care, and education, and energy, and infrastructure on the altar of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs – trillions of dollars in giveaways that proved neither compassionate nor conservative.
Then, after hitting Bush, he ties McCain to Bush, and proceeds to hit them both:
But when it comes to the economy, John McCain and I have a fundamentally different vision of where to take the country. Because for all his talk of independence, the centerpiece of his economic plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush’s policies. He says we’ve made "great progress" in our economy these past eight years. He calls himself a fiscal conservative and on the campaign trail he’s passionate critic of government spending, and yet he has no problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for big corporations and a permanent occupation of Iraq – policies that have left our children with a mountain of debt.
Then he throws in a little party unity, while hitting Bush:
George Bush’s policies have taken us from a projected $5.6 trillion dollar surplus at the end of the Clinton Administration to massive deficits and nearly four trillion dollars in new debt today.
We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another. Well we’ve been there once, and we’re not going back. It’s time to move this country forward.
I think he's doing a great job of tying McCain to Bush right now, and he's going to continue to do so. The beauty of this is, McCain is so bad on his own, that Obama could just concentrate on what McCain plans to do, and eviscerate him that way.
As late as December, John McCain told a newspaper in New Hampshire that he’d love to offer a solution to the housing crisis, but he just didn’t have one. It took him three different tries to figure it out, and in the end, his plan does nothing to help 1.5 million homeowners who are facing foreclosure, even as he supported spending billions to bail out Wall Street. President Bush told the American people he thought the biggest danger arising from this housing crisis was the temptation to do something about it. Now Senator McCain wants to turn Bush’s policy of ‘too little, too late’ into a policy of ‘even less, even later’. That’s not the change we need right now. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place.
John McCain takes great pride in saying that he’s a fiscal conservative, and he’s already signaled that he will try to define me with the same old tax-and-spend label that his side has been throwing around for decades. But let’s look at the facts.
John McCain once said that he couldn’t vote for the Bush tax breaks in good conscience because they were too skewed to the wealthiest Americans. Later, he said it was irresponsible to cut taxes during a time of war because we simply couldn’t afford them. Well, nothing’s changed about the war, but something’s certainly changed about John McCain, because these same Bush tax cuts are now his central economic policy. Not only that, but he is now calling for a new round of tax giveaways that are twice as expensive as the original Bush plan and nearly twice as regressive. His policy will spend nearly $2 trillion on tax breaks for corporations, including $1.2 billion for Exxon alone, a company that just recorded the highest profits in history.
Think about that. At a time when we’re fighting two wars, when millions of Americans can’t afford their medical bills or their tuition bills, when we’re paying more than $4 a gallon for gas, the man who rails against government spending wants to spend $1.2 billion on a tax break for Exxon Mobil. That isn’t just irresponsible. It’s outrageous.
If John McCain’s policies were implemented, they would add $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That isn’t fiscal conservatism, that’s what George Bush has done over the last eight years. Not only can working families not afford it, future generations can’t afford it. And we can’t allow it to happen in this election.
The beauty of this is, he didn't spend the entire speech slamming McCain, he's going into detail about what HE'S going to do to fix the problem. He's framing this debate on the economy, and I don't see how McCain can win (at least with people that are actually paying attention)
I’ll take a different approach. I will reform our tax code so that it’s simple, fair, and advances opportunity instead of distorting the market by advancing the agenda of some lobbyist or oil company. I’ll shut down the corporate loopholes and tax havens, and I’ll use the money to help pay for a middle-class tax cut that will provide $1,000 of relief to 95% of workers and their families. I’ll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we’ll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills. We’ll also eliminate income taxes for any retiree making less than $50,000 per year, because every senior deserves to live out their life in dignity and respect. And while John McCain wants to pick up where George Bush left off by trying again to privatize Social Security, I will never waver in my commitment to protect that basic promise as President. We will not privatize Social Security, we will not raise the retirement age, and we will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.
Now, contrary to what John McCain may say, every single proposal that I’ve made in this campaign is paid for – because I believe in pay-as-you-go. Senator McCain is right that there’s waste in government, and I intend to root it out as President. But his suggestion that the earmark reforms that we’re both interested in implementing will somehow make up for his enormous tax giveaway indicates that John McCain was right when he said that he doesn’t understand the economy as well as he should. Either that or he’s hoping you just won’t notice. Whatever it is, it’s not the kind of change we need in Washington right now.
Ouch, I kind of felt the sting from that one. . .
He hits on a big issue that he's been hitting on before by talking about college affordability, and he ties it to his own story stating how he can relate to us because he didn't have a rich mommy and daddy to pay for his education. And McCain has NOTHING on this (I know, I checked when I was writing my diary comparing the two on Education):
I’ll be talking in more detail next week about how we can make our workforce more competitive by reforming our education system, but there’s also an immediate squeeze we need to deal with, and that’s college affordability.
I know how expensive this is from firsthand experience. At the beginning of our marriage, Michelle and I were spending so much of our income just to pay off our college loans. And that was decades ago. The cost of a college education has exploded since then, pricing hundreds of thousands of young Americans out of their dream every year, or forcing them to begin their careers in unconscionable debt. So I’ll offer this promise to every student as President – your country will offer you $4,000 a year of tuition if you offer your country community or national service when you graduate. If you invest in America, America will invest in you.
As far as we can tell, John McCain doesn’t have a plan to make college more affordable. And that means he isn’t listening to the struggles facing a new generation of Americans.
And credit card debt/bankruptcy:
Finally, we need to help those Americans who find themselves in a debt spiral climb out. Since so many who are struggling to keep up with their mortgages are now shifting their debt to credit cards, we have to make sure that credit cards don’t become the next stage in the housing crisis. To make sure that Americans know what they’re signing up for, I’ll institute a five-star rating system to inform consumers about the level of risk involved in every credit card. And we’ll establish a Credit Card Bill of Rights that will ban unilateral changes to credit card agreements; ban rate hikes on debt you already had; and ban interest charges on late fees. Americans need to pay what they owe, but you should pay what’s fair, not just what fattens profits for some credit card company and they can get away with.
The same principle should apply to our bankruptcy laws. When I first arrived in the Senate, I opposed the credit card industry’s bankruptcy bill that made it harder for working families to climb out of debt. John McCain supported that bill – and he even opposed exempting families who were only in bankruptcy because of medical expenses they couldn’t pay.
When I’m President, we’ll reform our bankruptcy laws so that we give Americans who find themselves in debt a second chance. We’ll make sure that if you can demonstrate that you went bankrupt because of medical expenses, you can relieve that debt and get back on your feet. And I’ll make sure that CEOs can’t dump your pension with one hand while they collect a bonus with the other. That’s an outrage, and it’s time we had a President who knows it’s an outrage.
Here's a link to read the whole thing, it was really good. If they post a video I'll add it to the diary: Obama on the Economy in Raleigh
I know I better not hear ANYONE say Obama is just an empty suit, because this speech was ALL substance (with a bit of his bio thrown in at the end), and he put it in ways that the average American can understand.
UPDATE: I haven't found the video on YouTube yet, but here's a link to the full speech. h/t to Discipline28
When I find a YouTube link, I'll embed it :o)