Americans will choose today between two clear and distinct agendas. John McCain proposes more freedom, choice and prosperity. Barack Obama offers less of each.

John McCain would rejuvenate America's moribund economy by halving the capital gains and dividend taxes from 15 percent to 7.5, chopping the globally uncompetitive corporate tax from 35 percent to 25, and letting today's 45 percent death tax settle at 15 percent on estates above $5 million. He also has proposed letting Americans choose either today's 67,204-page tax code or a voluntary flatter, simpler tax with two rates of perhaps 25 and 15 percent.

Obama would stuff a pillow over the face of America's bedridden economy by boosting capital gains and dividend taxes from 15 percent to 20. He would hike top income tax rates from 33 and 35 percent to 36 and 39.6 percent. He also would maintain the 35 percent corporate tax and a 45 percent death tax on estates above $3.5 million.

Obama promises "tax cuts" to 95 percent of Americans, even though 44 percent of filers pay $0 in income taxes. A shifting target of taxpayers would finance these transfer payments.

"If you make $250,000 a year or less, we will not raise your taxes," Obama declared last July 8. "We will cut your taxes."

On Oct. 25, Obama's threshold slipped. "If you have a job, pay taxes and make less than $200,000 a year, you'll get a tax cut," he said in a commercial.

VP nominee Joe Biden told Scranton, Pa.'s WNEP last week that tax cuts "should go to middle-class people -- people making under $150,000 a year."

"It's interesting how their definition of rich has a way of creeping down," McCain said last month in Pennsylvania.

Wherever Obama's vacuum nozzle lands, he should unplug it. Tax hikes are foolish in boom times and idiotic when the gross domestic product shrinks 0.3 percent, as it did last quarter.

McCain would revolutionize health care by establishing an individual market, so Americans could own and control their insurance. They could buy across state lines and transport coverage from job to job, to school, to home-based business or wherever. Americans could stop keeping thankless positions at thoughtless companies solely to remain insured. McCain would offer $2,500 refundable tax credits for individuals and $5,000 for families to help purchase coverage that suits their needs, not The Man's.

Obama offers a potpourri of paternalistic options, from keeping employer-provided coverage to buying a government-run plan from his National Health Insurance Exchange.

"Insurance sold in the Exchange would be guaranteed issue and community rated," warns National Center for Policy Analysis president John Goodman. "This means people would be able to wait until after they get sick to insure, and they would be able to do so without any financial penalty."

Coverage costs have soared in states that impose these unforgiving regulations.

"This is America, the most resourceful country on Earth," VP nominee Sarah Palin told Toledo, Ohio, voters last Wednesday in a superb energy-policy address. "We can drill, and refine, and mine, enrich, reprocess, invent, build, conserve, grow and use every available means to regain our independence (on energy)."

McCain-Palin's "all of the above" approach would include fast-tracking 45 atomic power plants for construction by 2030. McCain also has promised Iowa corn farmers that they can kiss goodbye their costly, distorted, environmentally ruinous ethanol program.

Obama wants a windfall profits tax -- a disincentive to new oil production. He says he now favors offshore drilling. But watch Democrats exhume the just-expired offshore-drilling moratorium. Obama even sponsored legislation to prohibit expanded high-tech maps and measurements of sub-oceanic hydrocarbons. He also would increase mandated ethanol production 67 percent by 2030 -- never mind the global chaos ethanol triggered by turbo-charging corn prices.

With the economy gasping, America needs greater freedom, broader choices, lower taxes and cheaper energy. John McCain's congruent policies will spur prosperity. Barack Obama's contrary proposals will stymie it.

Up or down?

You decide.

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.Murdock@gmail.com.