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McCain proposes $52.5 billion economic plan

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-15 09:33

WASHINGTON -- Bidding for a comeback, Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Tuesday set out a new $52.5 billion plan to ease the economic pain of middle class Americans swept up in the country's financial chaos, as polls showed voters turning to Democrat Barack Obama for leadership in the turmoil.

Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., makes a campaign stop at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pa., Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008. [Agencies]

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During a swing through Pennsylvania, McCain, the 72-year-old Arizona senate veteran, called for the elimination of taxes on unemployment benefits, lowering what the government takes from seniors as they draw on retirement accounts and accelerating tax deductions for people forced to sell assets at a loss in the troubled market. He also said that as president, he would order the Treasury Department to guarantee 100 percent of all savings for the next six months.

He also kept up his campaign tactic of trying to sow distrust among voters about Obama. "Perhaps never before in history have the American people been asked to risk so much based on so little," McCain told a suburban Philadelphia audience.

Looking toward Wednesday's third and final presidential debate, Obama produced his own new plan on Monday, calling, among other ideas, for a 90-day moratorium on home mortgage foreclosures and tax breaks to business that create new jobs.

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said Tuesday that McCain's "trickle-down, ideological recipes won't strengthen our economy and grow our middle-class." Burton added that the McCain plan provides "no tax relief at all to 101 million hardworking families, including 97 percent of senior citizens, and it does nothing to cut taxes for small businesses or give them access to credit."

Democratic vice presidential Joe Biden accused McCain of having no new ideas. "What did John McCain do? He laid out some new attacks on Barack Obama," Biden said at an Ohio campaign stop. "The distinction could not be clearer, one guy is fighting for you and the other guy is fighting mad."

US voters go to the polls in three weeks amid the worst economic uncertainty to grip the country in decades. Retirement savings are at risk in the gyrating stock market, the values of homes, the foundation of middle class economic security, are sinking, tens of thousands of homeowners face foreclosure and unemployment has been moving relentlessly upward.

McCain's candidacy has slumped under the weight of growing voter anxiety about the country's economic future, in part because of his inescapable links with unpopular fellow Republican President George W. Bush.

New polling, meanwhile, held more discouraging news for McCain.

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