OPINION:
She’s a real nowhere girl. Sitting in her nowhere world. Making all her nowhere plans for nobody.
Poor Hillary Clinton. She’s trying so fervently to come up with at least one new, inspiring idea to jump-start a moribund economy and help the financially stressed-out middle class. She’s like the economics professor in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”: “Anyone? Anyone?” But the left’s idea cupboard is pitifully empty. They literally, not figuratively, have nothing to offer except tax, spend, spin and then hit the button again.
So in her speech on Thursday on the economy, she proposed last week’s leftover cold porridge. And it doesn’t taste any better today than when President Obama first served it up.
In her missive on the economy, Hillary pledged a jobs program “within my first hundred days in office.” Sure. But her former boss, Barack Obama, has had not just 100 but closer to 3,000 days to come up with a jobs program. Where are the jobs? Where are the pay raises? Where is the growth?
Hillary is in the awkward position of having to praise the Obama recovery that has flatlined paychecks, left 94 million Americans outside the labor force, created the biggest deficits and national debt in world history, and has almost half of Americans thinking we are still in a recession or headed into a new one. Two-thirds of Americans think the American Dream is dead. Yet Hillary with a straight face complains that Mr. Obama doesn’t “get the credit he deserves” for the condition of the U.S. economy.
Of course, this actually is a good economy if you are one of those lucky few who can leverage political connections to give $250,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs. Then everything looks peachy.
What is the Hillary agenda, exactly? She’s touting “bold ideas” such as raising the minimum wage, making rich people pay more taxes, $250 billion more government spending on public works projects to featherbed her union pals.
We’ve had three minimum-wage increases this past decade and countless state and municipalities have gone as high as $10, $12 or even $15 an hour. This isn’t new. Mr. Obama has raised income taxes, estate taxes, dividend taxes, capital gains taxes, Medicare taxes, drug and vaccine taxes — all aimed at the rich. Income inequality has gotten worse under Mr. Obama.
She also wants free college tuition for the middle class, which just means people will pay for college through their taxes, not their tuition payments. That will obviously drive up college costs, just as the student loans have triggered dollar-for-dollar tuition hikes at major universities. (Donald Trump should declare no more federal aid to any college that has more than a $500 million endowment. The universities have become storehouses of wealth and it is time they use that money to make their schools affordable.)
On Obamacare, she promises to “double-down.” Wow. Nearly every single day we get more bad news on Obamacare. It’s the Hindenburg of health care. Costs and premiums are rising in many states by double digits, the health care exchanges are going bankrupt, businesses are restricting hiring and hours worked to get around the law, and insurance companies are dropping out. Other than that, it has been a glorious success.
She wants to raise the capital gains tax to 46 percent. She wants to raise the tax on pass-through small- and medium-sized businesses to 45 percent. These are direct taxes on American employers and the risk-takers who invest in them. And if people are really successful in business and they dare get rich, the government will snatch almost half of their lifetime savings in taxes when they die under Hillary’s plan.
What kind of upside-down economic theory tells you that the way to get more jobs is to place higher taxes on the businesses that create the jobs? I have invented a term for this: economic bimboism. Mr. Trump needs to make this point over and over: He wants to tax businesses at 15 percent. She wants to tax them at 45 percent. Then ask the American people: Which will bring more jobs to America?
The Tax Foundation says that the Clinton tax and economic plan will actually reduce jobs by 300,000 and subtract from our already weakling economic growth rate. That means we will be flirting with recession.
In short, this nowhere girl has a nowhere plan — for nobody.
• Stephen Moore is an economic consultant with Freedom Works and a senior economic adviser to the Trump campaign.
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