"Obama Delivered Speech Outlining His Economic Proposals"

joy sinha's diary on Kos:

Barack Obama gave a speech today in Iowa outlining his economic proposals which the campagin termed as the "American Dream". The speech draws heavily from Obama's own experience, having been raised by his single mother and maternal grandparents, and of course from his work as a community organizer.

Some excerpts from the speech below.

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1. Provide a middle class tax cut of up to $1,000 for working families, and eliminate the income tax for retirees making less than $50,000 per year.

2. Address the challenge of balancing work and family by guaranteeing workers paid sick days, expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), supporting paid FMLA, and doubling funding for after-school programs.

3. Help Americans buy and keep their homes. Protect American families by reforming bankruptcy laws, establish credit card bill of rights (which will ban unilateral changes to a credit card agreement; ban rate changes to debt that's already incurred; and ban interest on late fees etc) , and abusive payday lending practices.

4. Reduce health care costs by $2,500 for a typical family. Strengthen retirement security by automatically enrolling workers in portable retirement accounts and providing additional incentives for Americans to save. Put the cost of college in reach by providing a $4,000 refundable tax credit available at the time of enrollment, and create a Community College Partnership Program to strengthen this vital resource for American students.

He ended the talk by somewhat defining what the politics of hope means:

There has been a lot of talk in this campaign about the politics of hope. But the politics of hope doesn't mean hoping that things come easy. It's a politics of believing in things unseen; of believing in what this country might be; and of standing up for that belief and fighting for it when it's hard.

America is the sum of our dreams. And what binds us together, what makes us one American family, is that we stand up and fight for each other's dreams, that we reaffirm that fundamental belief – I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper – through our politics, our policies, and in our daily lives. It's time to do that once more. It's time to reclaim the American dream.

Note: The full speech is posted over at TPM