offer paid apprenticeships. To reduce student debt, she wants to “make debt-free college available for everyone” and make it easier to refinance existing student loans.
Workplace Policies
Surprise! Workers are happier and more productive when employers pay them fairly and take steps to help them achieve a better work-life balance. But the two parties disagree on who should be responsible for promoting these goals, and in particular on the role of unions.
Republicans: The GOP sees labor laws that empower unions as a barrier to business development. It promotes “Right-to-Work” laws that would end union-shop policies requiring employees to join a union or pay union dues as a condition of employment. The platform also endorses employee stock ownership plans that “enable workers to become capitalists” and says companies should have nondiscrimination policies to “ensure all employees have the chance to succeed based solely on their merits” (though it doesn’t call for federal legislation to enforce these policies). As for the minimum wage, the GOP platform says that’s an issue that “should be handled at the state and local level.”
Trump himself has a reputation as a union-buster at his hotels, and the leaders of most national unions have come out against him. But his populist positions on trade and immigration seem to appeal to rank-and-file union members, who break evenly for Trump and Clinton in most polls.
Democrats: The Democratic platform paints Right-to-Work laws as “wrong for workers” and says Trump’s stance against collective bargaining would create “a race to the bottom where the middle class is fighting over fewer and fewer good-paying jobs.”
In her June economics speech, Clinton called for equal pay for women, a higher national minimum wage, portable healthcare and retirement-savings benefits, universal paid family leave, wider access to preschool programs and other forms of childcare, and policies to encourage employee profit-sharing. The Democratic platform goes into more detail, calling for a $15/hour minimum wage, stronger overtime pay rules, a larger and better-paid caregiving workforce, and a new family and medical leave act providing 12 weeks of paid leave for a new child or sick family member.
Infrastructure
Remember President Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” speech during the 2012 election? Republicans painted it as a dig against entrepreneurs, but Obama’s point was that we can’t do much on our own. “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive,” the president said. “Somebody invested in roads and bridges…Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” The two parties don’t really disagree on the need for public investment in infrastructure, but they do differ on how to manage it.
Republicans: The GOP platform says “everyone agrees on the need for clean water and safe roads, rail, bridges, ports, and airports” and notes that “investments and transportation and other public construction have traditionally been non-partisan.” But it accuses the Obama administration of using infrastructure as a political football and trying to “coerce people out of their cars” by pursuing “an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” The platform calls for an end to Highway Trust Fund spending on mass transit, ferries, bike sharing, sidewalks, trails, and historical renovations. The GOP would also cancel California’s high-speed rail project, introduce competition for Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor, and remove legal roadblocks to public-private infrastructure partnerships.
Trump himself, who seems to love nothing more than building stuff, sounds like a Democrat when it comes to infrastructure spending. He wrote in his campaign book Crippled America that investments in roads and schools pay for themselves, and he called for a $1 trillion rebuilding plan that would supposedly create 13 million new jobs. (Bernie Sanders used the same figures in his own infrastructure plan.)
Democrats: I’m nutty for infrastructure, so I’m going to quote this forceful section of the Democratic platform at length: “If we are serious about reversing the decline of the middle class, we need major federal investments to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and put millions of Americans back to work in decent paying jobs in both the public and private sectors. The climate emergency and the need to expand the middle class demand that we make the most ambitious investment in American infrastructure since President Eisenhower created the interstate highway system. We will put Americans to work updating and expanding our roads, bridges, public transit, airports, and passenger and freight rail lines. We will build 21st century energy and water systems, modernize our schools, and continue to support the expansion of high-speed broadband networks. We will protect communities from the impact of climate change and help them to mitigate its effects by investing in green and resilient infrastructure…These investments will create secure, good-paying middle-class jobs today and will substantially increase demand for American-made steel and other products manufactured in the United States. And by boosting economic growth in a fair and equitable way, and strengthening our long-term competitiveness, these investments will create many more jobs in the years to come.”
To help finance all of this, Democrats propose creating a national infrastructure bank that would match private-sector or local government investments with money from Congress. Clinton endorsed the infrastructure bank idea in her June economics speech, and said she’d put some of the money into school renovations, fixing municipal water systems, and a more resilient power grid.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing powered the mid-20th-century boom in middle-class jobs, and both of the major party candidates believe that could happen again, but they would take very different routes to the goal.
Republicans: Trump, in his June speech in Pennsylvania, laid out an economic plan that’s heavy on manufacturing. Trump traced the decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs to the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. He said he’d renegotiate NAFTA and use tariffs to punish China for allegedly manipulating its own currency to undercut American factories. By getting a “fair deal for the American people,” Trump promises he would usher in “four, maybe eight great, great, great productive years…a new era of prosperity will finally begin.”
Democrats: While not offering a great deal in the way of specifics, the Democratic platform says the federal government must revitalize manufacturing communities and “create thriving hubs of manufacturing and innovation throughout the country.” In a nod to anxieties over globalization, the platform also says the government should “claw back tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, using the proceeds to reinvest in communities and workers at home.” Clinton says that in her first 100 days, she would work to pass a jobs plan that includes “transformational investments in key drivers of growth” including “advanced manufacturing” and “making America the clean energy superpower of the 21st century.”
Energy and Climate
When it comes to climate change and the need for new low-carbon and zero-carbon energy technologies, the Democrats and Republicans might as well be living on different planets.
Republicans: Donald Trump has famously called climate change a hoax perpetrated by China to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. He made no mention of climate
