Issue Position: Jobs & Economy

Issue Position

Our most urgent challenge is creating jobs and reviving our economy, and Connecticut's unemployment rate of 8.9% is unacceptable. Putting America and Connecticut back to work is the only way to re-energize our economy and ensure that Wall Street's recovery reaches Main Street. Many of these measures aim to expand hiring by small businesses -- the engines of job creation.

Among my specific goals will be

* Extending and expanding payroll tax exemption programs.
* Expanding tax credits for hiring, enlarging small business administration aid, and direct funding to states and cities for infrastructure/public works projects and public safety initiatives.
* Broadening opportunities and providing assistance for Americans to learn new life skills and transition from declining employment fields into growing ones by assigning new importance to community colleges, and expanding the Lifetime Learning Credit to older Americans coping with a changing workplace.
* Boosting our manufacturing sector, which despite global competition and massive job loss is still a world leader and vital to our prosperity, by supporting a permanent tax credit for research and development, and a tax credit for companies that manufacture their products in the United States.
* Supporting investment in clean-energy technologies, which will create as many as 2.5 million new jobs, boost the economy, and improve the environment. Clean energy investments generate roughly three times as many jobs as those generated by investments in carbon-based fuels.
* Supporting robust policies to promote exports and ending barriers to U.S. sales abroad, including action to stop Chinese currency manipulation that undervalues the Yuan and effectively imposes a tax on U.S. exports to China.

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