From The Economist: Hillary Clinton’s plans for the economy

[Lafayette]

Can she fix it?

Excerpt:

The not-a-fan belt

To gauge Mrs Clinton’s programme, start with the Clintonomics that her husband pursued in the mid-1990s. Broadly, it got the big things right by transforming a tax-and-spend party into one that took deficits seriously. Under Bill Clinton, the Democrats made peace with Wall Street and free trade, and agreed to ambitious welfare reform. Thanks to these sensible policies, and the fortuitous tailwind of higher productivity growth, the economy boomed and prosperity was shared.

America today is more divided; its economy is weaker and beset by problems. Since 2000 most workers’ incomes have stagnated, even as those of the richest have soared. Scarred by the financial crisis, battered by technological change and globalisation, less-skilled workers have fared worst. Many have left the labour force (54% of over-25s with only a high-school education are in work, down from 63% in 2000). An opioid [opium] epidemic is lowering their life expectancy.

Faced with all this, what are Mrs Clinton’s ideas? A lesser candidate would have veered to the left. Yet, even as Mr Sanders has proposed a top rate of tax of almost 70% and wants to scrap the trade pact with Canada and Mexico, Mrs Clinton has largely stood her ground. When she sets out to create “strong growth, fair growth, and long-term growth”, her rhetoric is hard to fault. In her plans to make college more affordable, grant paid leave to parents, introduce a $12 federal minimum wage* and increase infrastructure spending, she has the rudiments of an agenda that does not stray too far to the left.

*The current Poverty Threshold in America (for a family of four) is $24K per year, or about $11.50 per hour. (The average family income is $53.6K.) By implementing such a increase across the nation, America will pull-out from abject poverty 50 million men, women and children from below that Threshold. That's about 15% of Americans today, or the total population of both California and Illinois combined ...

 

[gavinfielder]

Ugh, the Economist.

If we wanted a neoliberal analysis of neoliberal policies, look no further.


Bill Clinton's financial sector deregulation set up the 2007 crash in the first place. The brief budget surplus was instrumental in the same--recessions are fairly inevitable when you take billions per year out of the private sector (read: the economy) and put it into government. The only thing that kept the (edit: bigger) recession at bay until 2007 was credit bubbles.



No, she can't fix it, even if she could be trusted to try. She can put a bandaid and some concealer on it and hope the next recession won't come during her term.

 

[Moderate Right]

Liberal claptrap. I swear, they live in a fantasy land where everything just works out. Raising the minimum wage excessively not only puts many people out of work (meaning that they go from earning 24K per year to ZERO), but these increases will spur inflation up to the point where the wage it was raised up to is right back to being a minimum wage, not a living wage. Liberals just seem to have no clue that the policies that they pursue, that sound so great, actually hurt the poorer, not help them, and the middle class goes even more bye bye.