RUTHFULLY YOURS

The question came up this week at a political panel: Why don’t people like Hillary Clinton?

Why do they always believe the worst? Why, when some supposed scandal breaks and someone says she’s hiding something, do people, including many of her supporters, assume it’s true?

The answer is that Mrs. Clinton has been in America’s national life for a quarter-century, and in that time people watched, observed and got an impression of her character.

If you give the prompt “Clinton scandal” to someone under 30, they might say “emails,” or Benghazi” or “Clinton Foundation,” or now “health questions.” But for those who are older, whose memories encompass the Clinton era, the scandals stretch back further, all the way to her beginnings as a national figure.

Seventeen years ago, when word first came that Mrs. Clinton might come to New York, a state where she’d never lived, and seek its open U.S. Senate seat, I wrote a book called “The Case Against Hillary Clinton.” It asserted that she would win and use the Senate to run for president, likely in 2008. That, I argued, was a bad thing. In the previous eight years she’d done little to elevate our politics and much to lower it. So I laid out the case as best I could, starting with the first significant scandal of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

It is worth revisiting to make a point about why her poll numbers on trustworthiness are so bad.

It was early 1993. The Clintons had just entered the White House after a solid win that broke the Republicans’ 12-year hold. He was a young and dashing New Democrat. She too was something new, a professional woman with modern attitudes and pronounced policy interests. They had captured the national imagination and were in a strong position.

Then she—not he—messed it up. It was the first big case in which she showed poor judgment, a cool willingness to mislead, and a level of political aggression that gave even those around her pause. It was after this mess that her critics said she’d revealed the soul of an East German border guard.

The Clinton White House was internally a dramatic one, as George Stephanopoulos later recounted in “All Too Human,” his sharply observed, and in retrospect somewhat harrowing, memoir of his time as Mr. Clinton’s communications director and senior adviser. He reported staffers and officials yelling, crying, shouting swear words and verbally threatening each other. It was a real hothouse. There was a sense the gargoyles had taken over the cathedral. But that wouldn’t become apparent until later. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump’s economic program has gone through several revisions and now deserves a citation at Trump University for “most improved.” The candidate’s New York Economic Club speech on Thursday, which included new tax reform details, was an encouraging if sometimes contradictory performance.

Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is often grim, but in New York maybe for the first time he talked more about solutions than problems. He even mentioned unrealized human potential. “We reject the pessimism that says our standard of living can no longer rise, and that all that’s left to do is divide up and redistribute our shrinking resources,” he said.

Mr. Trump identified economic growth as the most important domestic priority and set a “national goal” of reaching 4% from the 1%-2% trend of the Obama economy. That’s ambitious, but 2% isn’t some immutable ceiling and better policy could lift GDP. Jeb Bush also took a 4% pledge, and such commitments are important in setting a direction for governance.
Growth can seem abstract, but it’s a general proxy for the standard of living. At 1%, the real economy will take about 70 years to double in size. At 2%, it’s about 35 years and at 3% only about 25. The question is whether Americans will benefit from the gains of this doubling of national wealth in their prime working years, or never. No major problem—from flat incomes to budget deficits to poverty—can be solved without faster growth.

Mr. Trump’s plan to overhaul a tax code that hasn’t been updated in 30 years would help. He’d collapse the individual income tax brackets from seven to three, with rates of 12%, 25% and 33%. To help make the fiscal math work, he introduced a new cap on deductions of $100,000 for single filers and $200,000 for couples. A cap is shrewd politics because it means not going to war with every pressure group in Washington that lives off loopholes. CONTINUE AT SITE

On September 10, 2016 Fox News reported, “Clinton: Half Of Trump Supporters ‘Basket Of Deplorables’ — ‘Racist, Sexist…You Name It.’”

This is the same Hillary Clinton whose campaign slogan, “Stronger Together” clearly does not include Americans who support Donald Trump and the effective enforcement of our immigration laws.

My recent article, “Balkanized America: Politicians, pollsters, and pundits are all responsible for the nation’s division” addressed the way that Americans are being turned against each other by flawed polls and the disgusting notion that voters’ desires are determined by their race, religion or ethnicity.

This is the parallel universe of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and their immigration anarchist cohorts wherein “Latino voters” supposedly oppose border security and effective immigration law enforcement.

To suggest that the conduct, goals and aspirations of Americans can be predicted solely by their race is, by definition, a blatant example of racism. This constitutes a vile form of profiling that would never be and should never be tolerated if done by law enforcement officers.

Furthermore, Hillary labels anyone who wants our borders secured and immigration laws enforced as xenophobic and racist, blithely ignoring the irrefutable fact that our immigration laws are utterly and completely blind as to race, religion and ethnicity.

America’s immigration laws were enacted to protect public health, national security, public safety and the jobs of American workers.

While Clinton brands as “racists’ those understand the truth, that our nation’s borders and immigration laws are our first line and last line of defense against international terrorists and transnational criminals and who therefore want our borders secured and our immigration laws enforced, in reality, she is actually the racist.

Furthermore, Americans who want our immigration laws enforced are not “Anti-Immigrant” as Hillary would have Americans believe, but are simply “Pro-Enforcement.” To be pro-enforcement is to be “Pro-immigrant.” Under our immigration laws, annually, the United States admits roughly one million lawful immigrants. The number of new immigrants the United States admits each year is greater than the number of new immigrants admitted by all of the other countries of the world combined.

The Clinton Foundation is a national and international scandal. It’s under investigation by the FBI, but not by the Attorney General of New York, who is instead targeting the Trump Foundation.

The media has spent weeks suggesting the existence of an inappropriate political relationship between Trump and Florida AG Pam Bondi. And yet it’s cheering the wildly inappropriate relationship which has resulted in a member of Hillary’s leadership council investigating her political opponent.

Some months ago, the spokesman for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had defended the trip he made to Miami Beach using donor money because he was fundraising for Hillary Clinton.

“This year, the Attorney General is doing everything possible to make sure Hillary Clinton is elected our next President.”

No one can argue with that as he abuses his office to launch his second legal attack on Trump.

Attorney General Schneiderman had previously made headlines for joining a group named “AGs United for Clean Power” to harass companies that questioned Global Warming. Some might have thought that blatantly identifying with one industry while harassing another would mean that Eric had hit peak conflict of interest. But then he opened an investigation into a rival political campaign.

“My interest in this issue really is in my capacity as regulator of nonprofits in New York State,” he insisted. “I didn’t make a big deal out of it or hold a press conference.”

The place he wasn’t making a big deal out of it was on CNN.

Schneiderman has no problem with the Clinton Foundation violating state regulations. But then again why would he? He endorsed the woman behind it and serves on her leadership council.

Bill Clinton had not only endorsed Schneiderman, but households across the state were irritated to hear a recording of him on their answering machines urging them to join him in voting for Eric. In June, Schneiderman was in Miami for an event benefiting the “Hillary Victory Fund.”

And he is still doing what he can for Hillary’s victory.

Donald Trump is no one’s idea of a traditional Republican, but his speech Tuesday showed the rank-and-file a better way to help workers at the bottom. Democrats pound the need to raise the minimum wage, which is a tricky political issue for the GOP. “Fight for $15” fits well on a protest sign, and it’s easy to paint opponents of a higher minimum wage as heartless, even though their economic reasoning is sound.

Speaking in a Philadelphia suburb, Mr. Trump proposed a new benefit: allowing families to deduct child-care expenses on their income taxes. For a single-parent household with no income-tax liability—the families that Democrats target with their minimum-wage message—this wouldn’t do much good. So Mr. Trump offered an alternative: an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to offset child-care expenses.

The EITC, signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1975, has for decades been championed by Republican and Democratic presidents alike. The word “credit” is a misnomer; the policy is better described as a wage supplement for low-income employees, topping up their income on a sliding scale.

To be eligible for the EITC a person must hold a job and earn income. The size of the annual payment depends not on tax liability, but on how much the employee earns and how many children he or she has. Payments phase out gradually as income rises, to avoid the counterproductive “cliff” effect that characterizes other social-welfare programs.

Economists have found much to like about the policy: A 2008 study, supported in part by my organization and published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, found that when the credit has been expanded in the past, employment of single mothers rose. So did their wages. Mr. Trump would build on this success by further expanding the credit to help cover eligible child-care expenses. The maximum supplement under his plan would be one-half the amount of the employee’s payroll taxes (i.e. FICA and Medicare). For married couples, the maximum would be calculated from the lower-earning spouse. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton’s comment that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”—a heck of a lot of phobia for anyone to lug around all day—puts back in play what will be seen as one of the 2016 campaign’s defining forces: the revolt of the politically incorrect.

They may not live at the level of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” but it was only a matter of time before les déplorables—our own writhing mass of unheard Americans—rebelled against the intellectual elites’ ancien régime of political correctness.
It remains to be seen what effect Hillary’s five phobias will have on the race, which tightened even before these remarks and Pneumonia-gate. The two events produced one of Mrs. Clinton’s worst weeks in opposite ways.

As with the irrepressible email server, Mrs. Clinton’s handling of her infirmity—“I feel great,” the pneumonia-infected candidate said while hugging a little girl—deepened the hole of distrust she lives in. At the same time, her dismissal, at Barbra Streisand’s LGBT fundraiser, of uncounted millions of Americans as deplorables had the ring of genuine belief.

Perhaps sensing that public knowledge of what she really thinks could be a political liability, Mrs. Clinton went on to describe “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them . . . and they’re just desperate for change.”

She is of course describing the people in Charles Murray’s recent and compelling book on cultural disintegration among the working class, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” This is indeed the bedrock of the broader Trump base.