His and Her Clintonomics Hillary says she’ll use Bill on the economy, but her policies are to the left of Obama’s.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/his-and-her-clintonomics-1463526482
In his 1992 campaign Bill Clinton liked to tell voters they’d be getting two for the price of one, and now Hillary Clinton is dusting off the same promise. She said this weekend in Kentucky that she’d put the First Husband “in charge of revitalizing the economy,” and she’s since added that “he’s got to come out of retirement” to raise incomes and put people back to work.
Mrs. Clinton’s remarks are a revealing turn, not least because so far she’s been running for President Obama’s third term. But since Democrats seem to agree that the economic status quo is dismal, and thus they can’t run on Mr. Obama’s record, the presumptive nominee is trying to confuse voters with halcyon memories of the 1990s boom.
The Clinton gang has since “clarified” that Mr. Clinton’s ministrations will be confined to distressed U.S. regions like inner cities or coal country. Maybe they realized that vowing to outsource one of her most important jobs might diminish her as a candidate.
Her larger problem is that the Obama-era Democratic Party has repudiated the Democratic Party’s Bill-era centrist agenda. They now call themselves progressives, not New Democrats, and they take their marching orders from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, not Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan. Mrs. Clinton has accommodated this trend to the pre-Bill left.
The Clinton contradiction is that she claims she’ll produce economic results like her husband did with economic policies like Mr. Obama’s. For the record, let’s lay out the differences between the agenda that helped drive the prosperity of 1993-2001, when the U.S. economy expanded by 3.8% annually on average, and what Mrs. Clinton is proposing to close out the 2010s, when GDP growth has failed to exceed 2.5% in a single year.
• Taxes. Bill Clinton raised income taxes in 1993 to a top rate of 39.6%, but Democrats lost Congress in 1994 and he never did that again. In 1997 Mr. Clinton even compromised with the Newt Gingrich Republicans and cut the top capital gains tax rate to 20% from 28%. His wife wants to nearly double the top tax rate on long-term cap gains to 43.4% from 23.8%, in the name of ending “quarterly capitalism.” That’s higher than the 40% rate under Jimmy Carter, and she’d also impose a minimum tax on millionaires and above, details to come. CONTINUE AT SITE
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