AGENDAS AND POLICIES

This election campaign has been driven more by personality clashes than
differences in policy. But as America votes, what are the key issues, and where
do Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand?

TAXES
Hillary Clinton wants to address income inequality through increased taxes on
the wealthy. She has called for a 4% surtax on incomes over $5m, a boost in the
capital gains tax, treating "carried interest" income earned by hedge fund
managers as income and not capital gains, the closing of "tax loopholes" for the
wealthy and an increase in the estate tax. She has also called for higher tax
breaks for healthcare and education spending for middle-class families.
According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the top 1% would pay for
roughly three-quarters of Mrs Clinton's tax increases.
According to an analysis from the conservative Tax Foundation, Donald
Trump's latest plan would cost the US government about $5.9 trillion in revenue
over 10 years, about half as much as the proposal he set out last September. Mr
Trump's current plan includes reducing the number of tax brackets from seven
to three, cutting corporate taxes, eliminating the estate tax and increasing the
standard deduction for individual filers. According to the Tax Foundation
analysis, the top 1% of earners would see their income increase by doubledigits, while the bottom quarter gets a boost of up to 1.9%.

JOB CREATION
Donald Trump says he will create 25 million jobs over 10 years, saying too
many jobs, especially in manufacturing, are being lost to other countries. He
plans to reduce the US corporate tax rate to 15% from the current rate of 35%,
and suggests that investing in infrastructure, cutting the trade deficit, lowering
taxes and removing regulations will boost job creation.
Hillary Clinton wants to create jobs by investing in advanced manufacturing,
technology, renewable energy, and small businesses. She also plans to increase
employment training, funded in part by by tax revenue from wealthier
Americans. She says independent experts have estimated her plans will create
10 million new jobs.

IMMIGRATION
This is Donald Trump's signature issue. Despite critics who call it unaffordable
and unrealistic, the Republican has stood by his call to build an impenetrable

wall along the 2,000-plus-mile US-Mexico border. He has also called for
reductions in legal immigration, ending President Barack Obama's executive
actions deferring deportation proceedings for undocumented migrants, and more
stringent efforts to reduce the number of these migrants living in the US. The
candidate has backed away from earlier calls for the forced deportation of the
more than 11 million undocumented migrants living on US soil and temporarily
closing the US border to all Muslims - but not dropped them.
Hillary Clinton has said she wants to continue and expand upon President
Barack Obama's unilateral executive actions normalising the immigration status
of long-term undocumented residents of the US and their families (some of
which have been suspended by US courts). She has called for comprehensive
immigration reform that includes a means for undocumented immigrants to
obtain permanent legal residency and, eventually, US citizenship. She opposes
privately run detention facilities and has said a wall is a "dumb way" to ensure
border security.

FOREIGN POLICY
During her tenure as a US senator and secretary of state, Hillary Clinton earned
a reputation as a foreign policy hawk. She supported the US war in Iraq - a
position which she says she now regrets - and was one of the leading Obama
administration advocates for the US air campaign in Libya. She has called on
the US to take on an expanded role in fighting the so-called Islamic State in
Syria, including the imposition of a no-fly zone and arming Syrian rebels,
although she says she opposes the commitment of ground troops (this blanket
statement does not seem to include special forces, however). She also supports
arming Kurdish peshmerga fighters. Mrs Clinton supports a continued US
military presence in Afghanistan, and firmly backs the US role in Nato, seeing it
as important for strengthening European allies and countering Russian power.
Donald Trump has criticised the Iraq War (although his claims that he opposed
it from the start are unfounded) and other US military action in the Middle East.
He has called for closer relations with Vladimir Putin's Russia and says the US
must make allies in Europe and Asia shoulder a greater share of the expense for
their national defence and emphasises that US foreign policy must always
prioritise American interests. On the other hand, Mr Trump has also taken a
hard-line stance toward combating IS and has even at times asserted the US
should commit tens of thousands of ground troops to the fight. He says Nato

should do more to combat terrorism in the Middle East, maintaining that the US
foots too much of the bill for the Alliance and that other allies should spend
more on their own protection.

REFUGEES
Donald Trump has been warning that the US policy of admitting refugees from
certain regions - the Middle East or, more generally, Muslim nations - presents a
serious threat to US national security. He has attempted to bolster his case by
citing often debunked internet rumours, such as that Syrian refugees are largely
young, single men. He has called for the US to suspend resettling refugees until
"extreme vetting" procedures can be implemented, including ideological tests to
screen out extremists. He asserts that nations in the Middle East - which have
already received millions of Syrian and Iraqi refugees - must do more to create
safe zones for those fleeing the violence.
Hillary Clinton has called for an increase in the number of Syrian refugees
resettled in the US from the current 10,000 annual level to 65,000 - which, Mr
Trump likes to point out, is a 550% increase. She cautions that the refugees
should be "carefully vetted", but notes that current procedures already involve a
multi-year application process and refugees do not know in which nation they
will be settled. She says the US has a history of welcoming those fleeing
oppression and violence, which she wants to continue.