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Obama favors the concept of equal pay the abolition of wage differences between genders. There the Court dismissed a woman's discrimination claim because she had filed it more than days after the first affected paycheck. The bill died in a Senate vote in which Obama and other Democrats could not break a Republican filibuster. In a July address to the National Education Association , Obama supported merit pay for teachers, to be based on standards to be developed "with teachers. Obama has proposed the American Opportunity Tax Credit , which would provide a refundable tax credit for education in exchange for community service.
Obama wants 5, failing schools to close, and then reopen with new principals and teachers. In a June podcast, Obama expressed support for telecommunications legislation to protect network neutrality on the Internet, saying: I can say what I want without censorship or without having to pay a special charge. But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it. Obama reaffirmed his commitment to net neutrality at a meeting with Google employees in November , at which he said, "once providers start to privilege some applications or web sites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out, and we all lose.
Reaffirming the White House's Commitment to Net Neutrality", the Obama administration, via Chief Technology Officer Todd Park , once again reaffirmed its commitment to net neutrality by stating, "Preserving an open Internet is vital not to just to the free flow of information, but also to promoting innovation and economic productivity.
According to the Tax Policy Center, the Obama plan provides three times as much tax relief for middle-class families as the McCain plan. Dividend rates would be 39 percent lower than what President George W. Bush proposed in his tax cut. Obama's plan is to cut income taxes overall, which he states would reduce revenues to below the levels that prevailed under Ronald Reagan less than Obama plans to pay for the tax changes while bringing down the budget deficit by cutting unnecessary spending. In The Audacity of Hope and the Blueprint for Change [] Obama advocates responding to the "precarious budget situation" by eliminating "tax credits that have outlived their usefulness", closing corporate tax loopholes, and restoring the PAYGO policy that prohibits increases in federal spending without a way to compensate for the lost revenue.
And so the most important thing that I can do for charitable giving is to fix the economy, to get banks lending again, to get businesses opening their doors again, to get people back to work again. Hungerford of the Congressional Research Service has written that "allowing the tax cuts targeted to high income taxpayers to expire as scheduled could help reduce budget deficits in the short-term without stifling the economic recovery.
Obama said he wanted to "look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness. Obama has spoken out numerous times against the influence of lobbying in the United States. On January 24, , in reference to his stated plan to take public financing should he procure the nomination, he said, "I think that for a time, the presidential public financing system works. According to his website, Obama would create an online database of lobbying reports, campaign finance filings and ethics records, and would create an independent watchdog agency to oversee congressional ethical violations.
Obama supports a guest worker program , [] and voted in favor of the Bush administration backed Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of Obama has said that he "will not support any bill that does not provide [an] earned path to citizenship for the undocumented population. Obama has said that he does not believe that the 12 million illegal immigrants should be deported. He said "It's not going to happen. We're not going to go round them up We should give them a pathway to citizenship.
Obama has supported granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. In June , Obama voted against declaring English as the official language of the federal government. In November , Obama stated that, "We can … go a long way toward meeting industry's need for skilled workers with Americans. Until we have achieved that, I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively. In July , Obama said, "Find out how many senators appeared before an immigration rally last year.
Who was talking the talk, and who walked the walk — because I walked…I didn't run away from the issue, and I didn't just talk about it in front of Latino audiences. I will also increase the number of people we allow in the country legally to a level that unites families and meets the demand for jobs employers cannot fill" "I support comprehensive immigration reform that includes improving our visa programmes, including the H-1B programme, to attract some of the world's most talented people to America", Obama said in an interview with IANS in October On 25 November , Ju Hong, a year-old South Korean immigrant without legal documentation, shouted at Obama to use his executive power to stop deportation of illegal immigrants.
And what I'm proposing is the harder path, which is to use our democratic processes to achieve the same goal. In reference to state ballot initiatives on affirmative action, Obama's spokesperson Candice Toliver said that "Senator Obama believes in a country in which opportunity is available to all Americans, regardless of race, gender or economic status.
That's why he opposes these ballot initiatives, which would roll back opportunity for millions of Americans and cripple efforts to break down historic barriers to the progress of qualified women and minorities. Obama writes in his most recent book, The Audacity of Hope: In July , after winning the primary, Obama said that he wants to expand federal funding of faith-based programs and establish a "Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships". He specified that, under his plan, federal money given to places of worship could only be used on secular programs.
In particular, he mentioned, on July 1 in Zanesville, Ohio , that "support for social services to the poor and the needy have consistently been underfunded". He went on to praise President Bush's efforts, but contended that the current administration's plan never managed to "rally the armies of compassion. On September 22, , Obama said, "I am not a Democrat who believes that we can or should defend every government program just because it's there We will fire government managers who aren't getting results, we will cut funding for programs that are wasting your money and we will use technology and lessons from the private sector to improve efficiency across every level of government The only way we can do all this without leaving our children with an even larger debt is if Washington starts taking responsibility for every dime that it spends.
Early in the Obama administration, some became aware of a program that provided free cellphones and service to the poor, concluding it was a new Obama program and branded the phenomenon as "Obamaphones. However, the cellphone program had begun in , as an extension of the Universal Service Fund dating back to at least , and is not funded with taxpayer money. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Political positions of Barack Obama.
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of Unemployment in the United States.
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. United States federal budget. United States debt-ceiling crisis of Income inequality in the United States. Health care reform in the United States and Health care reform in the United States presidential election, Retrieved November 19, Retrieved March 12, Retrieved December 30, Retrieved December 26, Retrieved December 12, Retrieved December 21, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Retrieved November 23, Retrieved March 25, Retrieved 9 July Archived from the original on March 30, Retrieved March 29, Retrieved 8 July Elmendorf, director of the CBO". Retrieved February 21, The New York Times. Archived from the original on May 11, Archived from the original on April 7, Retrieved April 12, Archived from the original on June 13, Retrieved July 5, The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved March 26, Szczesny August 26, Evidence from the 'Cash for Clunkers' Program". Social Science Research Network.
Federal Reserve Economic Database. Retrieved 10 July President Obama has been a great President for Job Creation". Retrieved November 26, Recoveries Really Aren't Different". Retrieved 5 October — via www. Government consumption expenditures and gross investment". Retrieved November 21, Retrieved April 5, Retrieved December 5, Retrieved November 25, Retrieved June 28, Retrieved August 10, Congress Approval Remains Dismal".
Retrieved November 20, Retrieved December 17, Retrieved March 24, Archived from the original on January 14, In the end, the administration will have to choose which initiatives on which it will decide to spend political capital. In terms of directly supporting fiscal policy, the Fed has begun to directly buy longer term Treasury Securities, to try to lower the cost of government borrowing, a direct measure to support fiscal policy expansion.
It is grossly unfair and ultimately self defeating for government to continue to function as a mechanism for socializing costs and risks for the financial sector, while ignoring the needs of workers, families and productive industries which provide good jobs with good wages and benefits. According to an October 26, article in the New York Times, Obama is considering a new payroll tax on large and medium employers who do not already provide their employees with health insurance, and this tax would be used to pay for health care for uninsured people, but Obama has not cited the specific percentage of payroll that the tax would be, or how small a number of employees the employer would have to have in order to be exempt from the tax. The negotiation process—likely to continue until , and possibly extended to —has been exponentially expedited and the final agreement will be sent to Congress for an up-or-down vote, assuming the sitting president supports the deal. The ' Economic Report of the President stated, "Nonfarm job growth turned consistently positive beginning in October Perhaps most worrisome is the political fall out of these problematic financial policies: Retrieved December 26, Still, with all its flaws, the plan was a significantly positive departure from the lack of significant effort by the Bush administration to address the deepening crisis.
This plan reflected a number of significant compromises and changes from the original bill proposed by the Obama Administration. A key concern of the bill was to spend the money quickly to fight the recessionary forces. Many progressives were disappointed with both the size of the package, as well as the excessive amounts spent on tax cuts, which are widely seen as less effective in stimulating jobs. Still, with all its flaws, the plan was a significantly positive departure from the lack of significant effort by the Bush administration to address the deepening crisis.
Among the massive problems insufficiently addressed by the Obama stimulus package but emphasized by the Progressive Economists is the serious fiscal situation of the state governments. Unless the Federal Government is able to send significantly more money to the states, they will have to raise taxes or fire teachers, firefighters, police and other public employees, significantly worsening the recession, and dramatically reducing the quality of public services. McNichol and Lav, It has three parts. The first part makes it easier for the nationalized housing banks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy housing loans, which should lower the costs of mortgages and make them more available to more people.
This will allow people to refinance their mortgages even if the value of their loans exceed the value of their homes by five percent. A second part of the plan gives a subsidy to mortgage servicers to agree to reduce monthly mortgage payments for distressed home owners. The problem with this is that it is a case by case approach, not a comprehensive one affecting millions of homeowners at once. Here too, it will have to come back to revisit this problem soon and probably take more radical action.
It has also pushed the IMF to enhance its lending facilities to promote economic recovery while reducing the degree of neo-liberal conditionality involved in these loans. These initiatives, however, have not been terribly successful, at least not as of this writing. Most members of the G, including the French and German governments, are strongly resisting a major, coordinated fiscal stimulus package. And the United States has not pushed the IMF strongly enough to reduce its conditionality, so that the effectiveness of IMF lending is likely to be dramatically undermined.
This is especially worrisome since the center-piece of the G plan from the London Summit is to triple the resources going to the IMF. They also urged a code of conduct on these banks that would limit the pay of high level officials, eliminate their ability to lobby the US government, and that would dramatically increase the transparency and accountability of these institutions. The statement was agnostic about the issue of nationalization, but supported the idea if it was necessary to achieve the goals listed above.
It has now become clear that as major US banks are or are nearly insolvent, that nationalization of a number of them is likely to be the best solution.
The structure allows the Obama administration to avoid going to Congress to get an additional allocation of public money. This is widely seen not only as non-transparent and lacking in accountability, but also as a massive subsidy for the banks, private equity firms and hedge funds. There is of course a long way to go before these policies are passed into law, much less implemented as policy. Any proposal along these lines will face a difficult political fight, but many progressives are encouraged that the Obama administration has made the fight against global climate change a major priority.
While most progressives prefer a truly universal system of health insurance in the US, some will see the Obama plan as a perhaps adequate movement in the right direction. But to reduce extreme inequality, there must be significant income tax reform. The Obama administration has taken tentative steps in that direction by proposing that a number of tax loopholes used by corporation and the very rich are closed.
But they have not proposed a massive change in the tax system that would greatly improve the relative after-tax, after-transfer position of the poor. So again, Obama is taking steps back toward the progressive direction, but they are quite tentative and small at this stage. See Citizens for Tax Justice, http: See the materials posted at PERI: It seems unlikely to pass soon. In the end, it will be difficult to say whether the Obama administration has made passage of the act a major priority, despite the very important support of organized labor in the election.
While these seem to be the key areas, the Obama administrations specific proposals are not encouraging. Crotty and Epstein and the Progressive economists called for a nine point program of financial regulation. The six most important components are these: Transform financial firm incentive structures that induce excessive risk-taking. Asymmetric and perverse incentives for top financial decision makers are ubiquitous in the present system.
They receive enormous bonuses when their firms make profits from excessive risk-taking in the boom that they do not have to give back in the downturn. Clawbacks could be required in compensation contracts or implemented via the tax system through a series of escrow funds. These institutions must be brought under a strict regulatory framework that should be applied to all important financial institutions.
Restrict or eliminate off-balance sheet vehicles. Banks hid trillions of dollars in risky assets off their balance sheets in the buildup to the crisis that hid their vulnerability from regulators and investors. All assets should be held on bank balance sheets and adequate capital must be set aside to support them. Implement a financial pre-cautionary principle.
This seems like a good time to review President Obama's economic record. In the longer term, policies such as new spending programs, changes to the tax laws, and The scale of the financial panic of and the extent of the job .. with the prospect of a new government with a very different agenda. The Congressional Budget Office projected two weeks prior to President Obama had pledged not to raise taxes.
Senior administration officials have telegraphed that a series of concrete tax proposals will play a key role in Obama's budget proposal, which is due out Wednesday. The White House has also signaled that Obama will propose cuts to entitlement spending. The president's budget, which comes after the Senate and House have each passed separate and very different budget frameworks, is not expected to be enacted. In fact, it has already drawn fire from the right and the left: And some Democrats and entitlement advocacy groups have blasted a measure he will propose that would result in smaller-than-promised Social Security benefits.
But the plan lays the marker for what Obama will seek in tax increases when he negotiates with Congress later this year. Some of the tax measures Obama will unveil formally on Wednesday will resemble his previous proposals, and in most cases, they will be aimed at the wealthy. Impose new limit on tax-deferred retirement accounts: It's unclear how the proposal would be implemented.
But in theory, "the logic of such a proposal makes sense: