The 2016 US presidential election is one of much contention, with both candidates causing controversy and many people questioning if they are qualified to be president. These are the issues I found were most important in the election and each candidates controversies.

Hillary Clinton

History: Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Party candidate in the 2016 presidential race. She over 30 years of political experience and was the United States Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, a New York Senator from 2001 to 2009, First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001 and First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and from 1983 to 1992.

Major Issues:

• Taxes– Clinton says she would like to, “restore basic fairness to our tax code,” by implementing a charge on multi-millionaires and billionaires so that the middle class is not paying the same amount or even more taxes than those who have more money than them. She would also like to cut taxes on small businesses and relieve working families of the high taxes they pay for health care.
• Education– Clinton has many plans in order to better our K-12 education system one of which is making schools a safe place for student to learn and live. She would like to provide the school system with $2 billion to help refine the disciplinary policies to close the school-to-prison pipeline. She would also like to provide all students the United States with the choice to learn computer science skills to help prepare the country for the technology driven future.
• Terrorism– ISIS and terrorist groups are increasing threats to the U.S. and Clinton has a plan to defeat terrorism and increase defenses. Clinton wants to work with U.S.’s allies in order to fight terrorism. Her plan to defeat ISIS is to support local forces and efforts to protect citizens. She would also like to resolve Syria’s civil war in order to stop the growth of ISIS. To harden our defenses she would like to give more support to our law enforcement and first responders in order to make the country safer.
• Racial Justice– Hillary is pushing three major methods for how to help racial justice. She says she wants to, “reform our broken criminal-justice system,” which just means she wants to make policies to end racial profiling by law enforcement and to help strengthen community relationships with the police force. She also says she wants to end gun violence in communities by cracking down on gun stores. Her third push is to close the education gap by making sure that “every 4-year-old in America has access to high-quality preschool’ and that all students are pushed to graduate high school and go to college. She wants to make college more affordable and relieve student debt.

Controversies: The main controversy that surrounds Clinton is her e-mail scandal. The story goes that she used a private e-mail server instead of the government servers she was assigned which has caused people to question how trustworthy she is. To make the whole situation more mysterious, Clinton deleted as many as 33,000 e-mails, which is another reason for people to think she is not dependable.

Donald J. Trump

History: Trump is the Republican Party candidate in the 2016 presidential race. Though he has no political experience, he does run an international conglomerate called The Trump Organization. His business has offered services such as construction, real estate development, entertainment, hospitality, retailing, and much more.

Major Issues:

• Taxes– Trump wants to cut taxes for everyone, especially form the middle class Americans. He does want to make sure the rich pay the taxes they should but that no one, including the rich, should have to pay high taxes. He also wants to simplify the tax system by making the seven tax brackets to three brackets. He wants to significantly lower the business tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent and, eliminate the corporate alternative minimum tax. He says he wants to increase the standard deduction for joint filers to allow people to pay even less taxes.
• Education– Trump wants to make it easier for students to go through the K-12 system and make it easier to pay for and finish college. He says he will make this happen by adding an, “additional federal investment of $20 billion towards school choice.” He also wants to work with congress to make college cost cheaper and make student debts more affordable. His end goal is to ensure everyone in America has the opportunity to attend a two or four-year college.
• Terrorism– Trump has been vocal about his hatred for ISIS, but his plan is not very detailed because he is afraid that if he details his plan, ISIS will be able to counteract it. He says he wants to work with U.S. allies in the Middle East to fight ISIS and other local terrorist groups. He wants international cooperation to help cutoff any money going to ISIS. In an attempt to protect America from terrorism, he wants to temporary suspend immigration from the, “dangerous and volatile regions of the world.”
• Second Amendment– The Second Amendment is another topic that Trump is very passionate about. He says that the government trying to dictate which guns we can buy and use is unconstitutional and that law-abiding gun owners should be empowered to defend themselves since our law enforcement cannot be omnipresent. To protect the Second Amendment he also wants to appoint supreme court justices that will defend the right to own firearms.

Controversies: Trump has two main controversies: rape allegations and racial housing discrimination. The rape allegations started even before the recent 2005 video was leaked in which Trump talks about how he would grab women from their genitals.

“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss, I don’t even wait and when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump said.

The racial housing discrimination controversy was from when him and his father rented out apartments. The two of them did not allow certain people to live in their housing because of their race and color.

And the Winner Is: I think that Clinton will be the winner of this election because even though I don’t agree with either of these candidates, she has caused less controversy and has more political experience. I am more excited to see the turn out for each of the third party candidates because there has been so much discontent with Clinton and Trump.

The information collected was gathered from HillaryClinton.com and DonaldJTrump.com