Hillary Clinton

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks Sunday at Saban Forum 2015 in Washington.

(Jose Luis Magana, The Associated Press)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Hillary Clinton wants new tax breaks that she believes would boost Cleveland and other areas reeling from the loss of blue-collar jobs.

The Democratic presidential candidate will propose the idea Tuesday when she rolls out a broad manufacturing agenda in New Hampshire, which holds the first primary.

Ohio, an electoral battleground where Republican opposition to auto industry bailouts was a huge issue four years ago, is very much on Clinton's mind, too.

"My plan will help spur reinvestment in communities right here in Ohio that have lost jobs because of factory closures," Clinton said in a statement to cleveland.com.

"By strengthening our manufacturing sector for the future," the former U.S. senator and secretary of state added, "we can help create the next generation of good-paying jobs and put more people back to work in Ohio and across the country."

The so-called Manufacturing Renaissance Tax Credit would be geared toward communities where plant closings or layoffs pose a permanent or "negative downward impact" on the local economy, according to details shared by Clinton's campaign. The thinking is that the public incentives would encourage new private-sector investment.

"Cleveland, along with the rest of Ohio, has experienced years of shifting industry and closing manufacturing plants," said U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge, a Warrensville Heights Democrat and Clinton backer. "Hillary Clinton's proposal to help protect communities like ours and encourage new industry to take root, is exactly the kind of thinking we need in our next generation of leaders."

A program of the scale that Clinton favors likely would cost billions of dollars a year. The campaign, though, has not yet specified how she would pay for it.

It also was not immediately clear what types of projects would be eligible for the perks. Incentives would be modeled after the New Markets Tax Credit, a federal program that involved a 39 percent credit to promote investment and job-creation in low-income areas.

Under Clinton's plan, communities also could choose an option that exempts those who invest longer than five years from paying capital gains taxes on the proceeds.

"There would be careful tests to ensure that investments were legitimately supporting new production and employment," according to a campaign fact sheet.

The New Markets program has won kudos from Cleveland's business elite, including Joe Roman, president and chief executive of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, which serves as the region's chamber of commerce. In a guest column last year for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, Roman wrote that one of the partnership's development affiliates had leveraged more than $100 million worth of incentives into 30 projects.

"The impacts of our NMTC investments are considerable and concrete - creating more than 4,800 permanent jobs, nearly 1,200 new housing units and more than 3 million square feet in new commercial and industrial space in Greater Cleveland," Roman wrote.

Tax incentives represent a key component of Clinton's economic agenda. Among her other proposals are tax credits for out-of-pocket health care costs and for those who care for disabled or elderly family members. Republicans have criticized Clinton's plans - even the tax breaks - as being heavy on spending and light on specifics.

"Clinton attacks GOP for tax cuts without plans to recoup revenue and/or cut spending to match it all the time, so these are programs she has no plan to pay for," the Republican National Committee's Sean Spicer told the Washington Post this month.