The next time I meet a typical voter—which, by the way, is difficult to do in Washington—here is a question I want to ask: How much does the promise of tax cuts or a reduction in government spending ease your anxiety about losing your job?

That query is at the top of my list because those seem to be the two prescriptions that the presidential candidates—Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama—are offering to cure what ails the middle class.

Obama talks incessantly about easing the middle-class tax burden, while McCain never misses a chance to rail against pork-barrel spending.

Both topics are beside the point when it comes to addressing one of the root causes of wage stagnation. People make more money the more productive they are.

Their productivity depends in large part on their skills. Workers who are worried about being left behind in global economic competition are probably wondering how they can reinvent themselves to move up the pay ladder. 

The best route to greater productivity is training. McCain and Obama rarely mention the issue.

McCain has gone further than Obama. He spoke briefly about training in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention.

“We’re going to help workers who’ve lost a job that won’t come back, find a new one that won’t go away,” McCain said. “We will prepare them for the jobs of today. We will use our community colleges to help train people for new opportunities in their communities.” 

McCain also made a passing reference to training during the third and final presidential debate October 15. To be fair, Obama also has talked about the importance of community colleges in strengthening the U.S. labor market.

But the candidates generally are silent on workforce development. A professor who specializes in the area gives tepid grades to Obama and McCain. “I would give them both a B-minus,” says Carl Van Horn, professor of public policy and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

I caught up with Van Horn at an October 14 event at the New America Foundation in Washington that focused on a study by Van Horn and Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy, titled “Anxious With Reason: The Future of the American Worker.”

McCain has not gone into depth about his ideas but has set himself apart from his party, according to Van Horn.

“Sen. McCain is much more interested in interventionist workforce policy than many other Republicans,” Van Horn says.

Obama, on the other hand, has concentrated more on job creation in the “green” sector of the economy and on traditional Democratic solutions like raising the minimum wage. He’s also hamstrung by labor union sensitivities over workforce development policies.

Another dimension of the issue is unemployment insurance. McCain endorses reforms in this area but has not provided detail.

“The system does not encourage people to retrain and support themselves,” Van Horn says.

The federal government spent more than $50 billion in fiscal year 2006 on a hodgepodge of training programs, according to the Workforce Alliance, a Washington advocacy organization.

But those efforts are disjointed and require presidential leadership to be shaped into a program that is truly helpful to the worried middle class, according to Julian Alssid, executive director of the Workforce Strategy Center (www.workforcestrategy.org).

When I talked to Alssid in early September, he hoped the candidates would spend time during the fall campaign outlining how they would prepare workers for better and higher-paying jobs.

“Both McCain and Obama have to have a much more clearly articulated vision and plan,” Alssid said at the time. “It runs to the heart of what people are concerned about in this country.”

Unfortunately, over the course of three 90-minute debates, neither Alssid nor the anxious middle class got the answers they were seeking.