The Washington Post, in a useful exercise, asked spokesmen for each of the three presidential candidates about what each of them would do to address our current economic problems. Go here, then click each candidate in turn.
The notion that Obama and Clinton have virtually the same policies does not hold, at least for this issue. And it is certainly not true that McClain is just like the Democrats. He stands for conservative free-market economic policies, addressing our problems through tax cuts, letting those who made bad investments fail, and refusing to bail out the financial industry. Obama offers a series of ingenious “incentives and guarantees” that would protect the little guys caught up in all of this, policies that would increase government’s impact in the economy, but which sound like they respect a free market and a free society. Clinton’s proposals, though, are full of government fiats: She would impose a 90 day moratorium on home foreclosures. The rhetoric is about what the government should permit and not permit. (E.g., “Complex lending vehicles for sophisticated financiers must ultimately be shown to benefit America’s working families”–shown to whom? who is going to have the power to approve or disallow such investments?) The point is, Clinton sounds far more hard-core statist than Obama does.
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