By IRNA,
New York : The economy has emerged as the top concern of voters in the presidential race, supplanting terrorism and the Iraq war as gasoline prices and unemployment have gone up and housing values and stock prices have gone down.
Their differences on the economy are every bit as stark as the difference on the Iraq war, where Obama favors beginning to withdraw United States troops while McCain wants to keep them there until they achieve “victory.”
McCain wants to extend the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy, cut corporate taxes and keep capital-gains taxes low. The tax cuts he promotes as benefiting the middle class include doubling the size of the exemption people can claim for each child.
And his call for repealing the alternative minimum tax, while it would still help some middle-class taxpayers, would still largely benefit the wealthy: some 80 percent of the benefit would go to the top 10 percent of earners, according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.
Obama wants to let the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy lapse, and he wants to raise the tax on capital gains and dividends and to tax the windfall profits of oil companies. He also wants to keep the estate tax, which many Republicans deride as the “death tax,” on people with estates valued at more than $3.5 million; McCain would exempt people with estates valued at up to $10 million and would impose a much lower tax rate.
Obama wants to use some of that money to pay for his middle-class tax cut and for the elimination of income taxes on retirees.
Alan Viard, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former economist for the Federal Reserve Bank who worked in the Council of Economic Advisers during Bush’s first term, said, “If you compare McCain and Obama’s proposals, one interesting point that people often don’t realize is that both have pretty substantial tax cuts.”
“We know that McCain wants to make all of them permanent,” Viard said of the Bush tax cuts, “but Senator Obama wants to make a pretty good chunk of them permanent as well.”
As the economy became the first debate of the general election, the only thing the two sides seemed to agree on was that they disagreed.
McCain said Tuesday that “we offer very different choices to the American people” while Obama said Monday that they had “a fundamentally different vision of where to take the country.”