Obama Deconstructed

Perusing candidates’ positions can be time consuming, but I strongly recommend you do it. Even to the candidate whose party you haven’t supported in the past.

Here are some excerpts found at Barack Obama’s site:

Provide a Tax Cut for Working Families: Obama will restore fairness to the tax code and provide 150 million workers the tax relief they need. Obama will create a new “Making Work Pay” tax credit of up to $500 per person, or $1,000 per working family. The “Making Work Pay” tax credit will completely eliminate income taxes for 10 million Americans.

No way! A Democrat whose top priority is to cut taxes!? Awesome.

Obama will work to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers, so workers can stand up for themselves without worrying about losing their livelihoods.

I really don’t support this; it’s just anti-business. If you’ve got employees and they don’t want to work for you anymore, let them leave. If they strike, find replacements who will work. This is an area that the government has no business regulating. Interventionist regulation is often heavy handed and over-reaching. Toss this one in the garbage bin, Barack.

Barack Obama will raise the minimum wage, index it to inflation….

Indexing the minimum wage to inflation is genius — I don’t see why it hasn’t been instituted in the past.

However, it’s conceivable that there could be negative effects. For example, imagine a period of stagflation (recession and high inflation at the same time) like the one the U.S. experienced in the 1970′s: the recession would mean layoffs for workers as business slows down. When inflation picks up, businesses won’t be able to afford the higher labor costs (labor costs would track rising inflation) and you’ll see even more layoffs, all at the worst possible moment, creating a vicious cycle.

Support Job Creation: We need to double federal funding for basic research and make the research and development tax credit permanent to help create high-paying, secure jobs. Obama will also make long-term investments in education, training, and workforce development so that Americans can leverage our strengths – our ingenuity and entrepreneurialism – to create new high-wage jobs and prosper in a world economy.

Good call on the support for increased investment in education. Hopefully, the increased research budgets will pay dividends. My question: where is he going to get the money to do this? Hopefully it’s not a pipe dream.

Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Obama believes we can get broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives.

Thumbs up.

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