Updated:

A response from McCain’s campaign: “While hardworking families are hurting and employers are vulnerable, Barack Obama has promised higher income taxes, Social Security taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes and tax hikes on job-creating businesses. Barack Obama doesn’t understand the American economy and that’s change we just can’t afford.”

Earlier:

Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign says he’s heading off today on a two-and-a-half week tour of battleground states talking about the economy. He’s in Raleigh today, and we know he has a $500+ per person fundraiser tonight downtown. Then he’s making the unusual step of sticking around for another day with a TBA event tomorrow.

But I just got off a conference call; Obama staffers were hammering points about the economy and what Obama would do.

Obama was in Cape Girardeau early last month talking about the economy from a factory floor. You can assume his return visit is a sign of just how much the campaign is making a play for Missouri.

Obama’s economic advisor Austin Goolsbee laid out a few basics of their talking points:

“This slow down is not a random business cycle event. It is very much the culmination of a failed philosophy pursued for the last eight years that says, ‘Let’s just keep cutting taxes … and not make the investments for ordinary Americans to relieve their struggle.’”

Goolsbee then went on to hit the core of Obama’s economic plan: an additional stimulus package of $50 billion, a $10 billion fund for foreclosure assistance, and tax cuts for “ordinary Americans in the country” which is apparently anyone making less than $150,000 a year.

Other parts of the call focused on tying Sen. John McCain to President George Bush.

All of this is pretty par for the course in the debate so far. Obama is kicking things off in North Carolina today, and the fact that the tour of swing territory is aimed at economics is no surprise. It’s the issue that McCain has acknowledged as a weakness.

On the other hand, Obama will need to counter accusations that he’s a tax-and-spend liberal. That’s something Jason Furman, a new economist aboard the Obama team, sought to counter this morning.

Furman responded to accusations about details saying that Obama’s strategy documents — many of them available at his campaign website — have always contained pay-as-you-go provisions. Furman added: “The largest single line in the Obama budget is for tax relief for ordinary Americans It simply isn’t true that he’s going to raise taxes for ordinary Americans”

We’re waiting for a response statement from the McCain campaign, but click here for McCain’s campaign points on the economy.