The nation's economy has been puttering along since the Great Recession ended in 2009.
The Democratic answer to slow growth is, at best, maintaining the status quo while imposing more regulation on businesses, and at worst, soaking the rich with higher taxes.
On the other side, most of the Republican presidential candidates - Donald Trump being the most recent - are offering tax plans that they say will improve the economy.
It's easy for critics and naysayers to pick apart each candidate's tax plan, and any plan proposed before the U.S. Congress certainly should be combed through in fine detail, but the Republicans are doing something the Democrats won't - offer tax plans to ease the tax burden, reduce the nation's cumbersome and confusing tax code, and help grow - instead of stifle - the economy.
The first complaint by Democratic pundits on any Republican tax plan, of course, is, "It benefits the rich more than the poor." And from a numbers-only perspective, such charges are generally true, as Kevin D. Williamson writes in the National Review.
"It is nearly impossible to cut federal income taxes in a way that primarily benefits low-income Americans, because high-income Americans pay most of the federal income taxes."
The 2.4 percent of households with annual incomes in excess of $250,000 pay about half of all federal income taxes, Williams wrote. The bottom 50 percent of U.S. households, in terms of income, pay about 3 percent. Responding to such critics of Trump's plan, Williamson points out, "the Trump tax cuts would not be very large for lower-income households, because those households don't have a lot of federal income taxes to cut."
So much for the nation's tax program favoring the rich.
Yet it's not just personal income tax that needs reformed. Among the 34 developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. has the highest top marginal corporate income tax rate, at 39 percent, and a complex method of collecting it.
The U.S. also maintains a counterproductive tax system that taxes worldwide activity of U.S.-based corporations - say sales of something manufactured in South Korea and sold in Switzerland - and then wonders why so many companies move their headquarters overseas.
The status quo on taxes and spending and more regulations on business won't grow the U.S. economy.
Time will tell what tax code changes are the best, but at least the Republicans are proposing positive change.