Presidential Candidates on Jobs, Income

Elections tend to be decided on economic issues, and the Wall Street Journal in July ran an analysis of the presidential candidates’ positions on several key economic issues.

The Shortliner shared the candidates’ tax plans in the last issue. This week, we focus on jobs and income.

Many Americans have grown anxious that the economy hasn’t lived up to its promise over the past 15 years of creating job growth that provides upward mobility and broadly shared prosperity. Instead, the nation has gone through two recessions marked by bubbles—one in the stock market and the other in housing—that were followed by recoveries in which economic growth returned but job growth lagged. Laying out a vision for how to restore widespread job and income gains is shaping up to be the top priority of the incoming president.

Clinton

Clinton has unveiled a raft of policy proposals detailing increased spending on everything from job training and community college education to broadband networks, infrastructure, and clean energy.

She has backed efforts to raise the federal minimum wage, to overhaul immigration
laws, and to boost women’s workforce participation by backing efforts to improve paid leave and access to child care.

She has also promoted using the tax code to provide breaks for companies that improve employee profit-sharing while raising taxes on upper-income Americans and taxing so-called carried interest earned by investors as regular income.

 

Trump

Trump has eschewed the sunny optimism of past Republican presidents by warning that the nation’s economic
supremacy is being tested like never before. He has published plans for large tax cuts but has generally offered fewer specifics on his signature agenda items, particularly his push to limit immigration and to revisit trade agreements.

Trump has embraced calls for more
infrastructure spending while promising to refrain from big changes to popular benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which account for a rising share of public spending and, as such, have been a ripe target of conservatives for decades. Instead, Trump has invoked his business experience as a real-estate developer and celebrity pitchman to burnish his appeal as a deal maker.

Source: Wall Street Journal