You’ve got to hand it to either Democratic challenger John Kerry, left, or Republican incumbent George W. Bush, right Here’s a comparison of how they stand on various issues.

Jobs

John Kerry’s plan to create new jobs includes a new jobs tax credit to help create manufacturing jobs and a proposal to end tax breaks that encourage companies to move jobs overseas.

He has proposed to invest in the nation’s infrastructure to create good jobs building and repairing the nation’s roads, transit and water systems, schools and other vital projects. (www. johnkery.com)

George W. Bush has presided over the worst loss of U.S. jobs since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression. To date the nation has lost 913,000 jobs since he took office. He has supported tax breaks for companies that move jobs overseas and refused to enforce U.S. trade agreements to protect American jobs. (Economic Report of the President, 2004)

Deficit

Kerry has pledged to restore “fiscal responsibility” and “pay as you go” principles which mean that the government will only spend what it takes in. That concept led to a record $200 billion U.S. budget surplus in President Clinton’s final year in office.

Kerry plans cuts in “corporate welfare” that aren’t spelled out specifically. Kerry proposes to roll back tax cuts for people who make over $200,000 each, which would raise an estimated $800 billion that Kerry could spend on education and health care. But Kerry also supports more than $400 billion in tax cuts, keeping Bush’s tax reductions on middle class Americans, and throwing in new ones, such as a $4,000 tuition tax credit for families sending a child to college.

“Neither candidate truly has a plan to rein in America’s burgeoning budget deficit.”
- Time Magazine

President Bush inherited a record budget surplus. But…

“In its latest fiscal forecast, released on July 30, the Bush Administration projects the deficit for the year ending on Sept. 30 will hit $445 billion. That would be $70 billion more than the record $375 billion deficit we hit last year. According to the White House and its GOP allies, this shows great progress in the battle against deficits.

“Look more closely at the Bush numbers and you’ll see that spending from ’03 to ’04 is up by a staggering $160 billion. Only $14 billion of that can be attributed to homeland security and Pentagon spending, including the war in Iraq.”

- Quote from Business Week Magazine

Freedom to join a union

Kerry supports the rights of workers to join a union, free from employer intimidation, harassment and threats. He is a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would ensure that when a majority of employees in a workplace decides to form a union, they can do so without the debilitating obstacles employers now use to block their free choice.

It allows workers to freely choose whether to form a union by signing cards authorizing union representation, provides mediation and arbitration for first contract negotiations and sets stronger penalties for employers that violate workers’ rights to form a union. (Senate Bills 1925, 2003)

Bush does not support the Employee Free Choice Act, which allows workers to join a union free from employer intimidation, harassment and threats.

During his presidency, he has taken away the collective bargaining rights of 170,000 workers in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 60,000 Transportation Security Administration airport screeners, 1,300 workers in the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and several hundred more in various U.S. Department of Justice agencies and offices. (www.GovExec.com, 11/12/03; The Washington Post, 1/20/02)

Exporting jobs.

“Right now, we’ve got a choice,” Kerry said in a statement. “We can keep on subsidizing companies who send jobs overseas, or we can reward companies who keep them here in America, where they belong.”

Kerry proposed targeting the outsourcing of jobs overseas with “the most sweeping international” tax reform law in 40 years.
Kerry said he would fight to change the tax code, which currently “rewards companies more for moving overseas than it does to reward them for creating jobs in America.” (CNN)

Chief White House economist Gregory Mankiw has said off-shoring of U.S. service jobs is “the latest manifestation of the gains from trade” and can be “a good thing.” Treasury Secretary John Snow has said the practice is “part of trade” and “trade makes the economy stronger.”
– Quote from Newsday.

“When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it…”
-From President Bush’s 2004 economic report.

Trade

Kerry supports significant changes in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he originally supported but now acknowledges has problems. “We’re going to identify every single imbalance or place in which there is an unfairness that has not been addressed, and we’re going to address it. I’m going to fix it,” he said in February 2004. He also supports strong worker protections in new trade agreements. (The New York Times, 2/17/04)

Bush wants to expand NAFTA. He currently is negotiating a Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement that will expand NAFTA to 34 Central and South American countries as soon as 2005. The proposed agreement does not contain strong worker, environmental or human rights protections. (Free Trade Area of the Americas website).

Medicare/Prescription Drugs

Kerry supports a comprehensive revamping of the Medicare prescription drug law President Bush signed last year. Kerry supports allowing Medicare to use its vast buying power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for seniors and to allow Americans to re-import prescription drugs from Canada, where prices are between 33 percent and 80 percent lower than in the United States. He also supports strengthening the law to discourage employers from dropping retiree health coverage and allowing states to negotiate discounts on prescription drugs. (www. johnkerry.com)

Bush supported and signed a Medicare prescription drug bill that created a huge gap in coverage that could cost seniors thousands of dollars a year, forbids Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices and encourages employers to drop health care coverage for retirees. Bush also backs the pharmaceutical industry by supporting the ban on re-importing prescription drugs from Canada and restricting state efforts to negotiate lower drug prices. (H.R. 1, 12/8/03)

Bush’s plans for health care would extend coverage to no more than 6 million people over the next decade and possibly as few as 2 million.

“There’s little reason to expect that there would be any reduction in the overall numbers of Americans without health insurance,” Brookings Institution health policy expert Henry J. Aaron said. “We’re swimming against a rather swift current in our efforts to reduce the number of uninsured, and the power of President Bush’s proposals to move against that current is, it seems to me, very, very limited.”
(The Washington Post 4/22/04)

Overtime pay

Kerry co-sponsored legislation to stop the Bush administration from issuing new regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act that could take away overtime pay rights for millions of workers. (Sen. Amendment 1580, 2003)

“Today, 6 million Americans across the country could get a pay cut from this administration,” Kerry said Aug. 23. This is only the latest insult to America’s middle class who are paying a higher tax burden, while at the same time wages are declining and families are paying skyrocketing costs for health care, energy and college tuition.

Bush’s Department of Labor published new rules in August governing workers’ overtime pay eligibility that could take away overtime pay rights for millions of workers. Those changes in the Fair Labor Standards Act affect workers in a wide range of occupations, including accounting, insurance, advertising, safety and health, human resources, public relations, computer work, financial services and “team leaders.” Workers making as little as $23,600 could lose overtime pay. (The Federal Register, 4/23/04; www.epinet.org)