Change We Can Believe In - Barack Obama,

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Obama was an early sponsor of the housing legislation recently signed into law that will help prevent hundreds of thousands of home foreclosures, provide critical support to communities that have been hard hit by the housing crisis, and create a badly needed affordable housing trust fund. But we need to do more, including taking long-term steps to prevent these problems from reoccurring. To this end, Barack Obama will:

       Provide ten million middle-class homeowners 10 percent off their interest rate through a universal mortgage tax credit.

       Close the mortgage company loophole that prevents families from renegotiating mortgages in bankruptcy court.

       Crack down on unscrupulous mortgage-lending practices and help prevent future housing crises by passing the STOP FRAUD Act.

       Create a Homeowner Obligation Made Explicit (HOME) score, which will provide potential borrowers with a simplified, standardized borrower metric (similar to APR) for home mortgages.

      Make It Easier to Balance Work and Family.

      Americans are finding it harder and harder to juggle the demands of work and of family. Not only are many parents struggling to find safe, enriching child care, but many are also now finding themselves caring for their aging and infirm parents. Meanwhile, too many of our workplaces are not set up to reflect the new realities of working parents with many familial demands. As a father of two young children and husband of a working woman, Barack Obama understands these demands deeply. As President, he will help families with their daily juggle to balance work and family. Specifically, an Obama Administration will:

       Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to cover more employees, to allow workers to take leave for elder care needs and for up to twenty-four hours each year to participate in their children’s academic activities, and to address domestic violence issues.

       Provide funding to help all fifty states adopt paid family and medical leave.

       Require employers to provide seven paid sick days per year.

      “For decades we’ve had politicians in Washington who talk about family values, but we haven’t had policies that value families … that’s why Washington has to change.”

      —BARACK OBAMA, June 23, 2008, Albuquerque, New Mexico

       Increase high-quality after-school and summer learning opportunities to two million additional children.

       Promote flexible work arrangements, such as telecommuting and nontraditional work schedules.

       Improve the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit by making it refundable and allowing low-income families to receive up to a 50 percent credit for their child care expenses. This proposal will benefit an additional 7.5 million working women.

       Protect against caregiver discrimination by enforcing the recently enacted Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines on caregiver discrimination.

       Fight for pay equity and close the gap between what women and men make for doing the same work.

      Bring Opportunity to Areas of Concentrated Poverty.

      Alleviating concentrated, intergenerational poverty is a difficult task, but there are comprehensive approaches that are successful in addressing the full range of obstacles that stand in the way of poor children. As President, Barack Obama will create twenty “Promise Neighborhoods” in cities that have high levels of poverty and crime and low levels of student academic achievement. The Promise Neighborhoods will follow the model of the highly successful Harlem Children’s Zone and seek to engage children and their parents into an achievement program based on tangible goals, including college for every participating student and strong physical and mental health outcomes for children, as well as retention of meaningful employment and parenting schools for parents.

      Every family in America has to reconcile what they spend with what they have; they must find a way to pay the mortgage, monthly bills, and insurance premiums; put food on the table and fill up the gas tank; and sock whatever they can away for a rainy day or to send a son or daughter to college—all at the same time. Often, it’s a struggle. But at the end of the year, the family budget has to add up. It’s the same for our entrepreneurs and for our largest corporations.

      But over the past eight years, Washington has ignored those rules and we have seen a dangerous erosion of the principles that have allowed our economy to thrive. Those who can make big campaign contributions or hire high-priced lobbyists are able to carve out huge loopholes in our tax code and win massive subsidies that shift the tax burden to small businesses and the middle class. Massive tax cuts have gone to the wealthiest individuals and hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks have been showered on big corporations. More than a half-trillion dollars have been spent on invading and occupying Iraq. Large future expenditures have routinely been omitted from the budget to mask their true cost. In total, legislation enacted over the last eight years has added $4 trillion to the deficit. As a result, we have seen a surplus of $236 billion at the end of the Clinton Administration that was projected to grow still larger over time instead turn into a deficit of more than $400 billion today. This has been the most fiscally irresponsible Administration in American history.

      Barack Obama will change how the government spends your money. He will restore honest, transparent government. He will make sure Washington spends taxpayer dollars wisely—investing in the future, not mortgaging it. He will modernize and simplify our tax code so that it provides greater relief to more Americans. He will lead an Administration that will make sure its numbers add up, and the result will be economic growth and prosperity for all Americans. As President, Barack Obama will:

      Pay for All Proposals and Cut the Deficit.

      Barack Obama recognizes that when you are in a deep fiscal hole, the first thing you do is stop digging. That is why he will pay for all of his proposals and reduce the deficit. We cannot afford another four years of a President who uses balanced budget targets as a political sound bite while actually adding hundreds of billions of dollars to our national debt. With the current uncertainty surrounding the state of our economy, Barack Obama believes the best way to demonstrate a genuine commitment to fiscal responsibility is to lay out how he will pay for all new proposals, return to conservative budget practices, and put forward tangible plans for immediate deficit reduction.

      Cut Spending and Reduce Government Waste.

      Barack Obama’s budget plan is a net spending cut—all of his new investments are more than paid for by cutting wasteful spending and streamlining government. As President, Barack Obama will cut spending by responsibly ending the war in Iraq, cutting subsidies for private plans in Medicare, eliminating subsidies for private student loan companies, reforming agricultural subsidies for high-income farmers, continuing the progress Democrats have made on earmarks by cutting them to at least the level they were in 1994, ending no-bid contracting, and phasing out unnecessary and duplicative programs. In an Obama Administration, overall spending will be lower than the average level of the last forty years, as well as lower than the average level under the current President.

      Put Medicare on Solid Footing by Reducing Costs and Improving Quality.

      Barack Obama understands that the biggest threat to our fiscal future is the fact that health costs system-wide, in both the public and private sectors, are growing rapidly. While some want to deal with this long-term fiscal threat by simply cutting benefits for Medicare and Medicaid and turning them into a second-class health system, Barack Obama believes that will violate the trust we have made with our nation’s seniors. As President, Barack Obama will put Medicare on sound fiscal

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