I finally got a hold of Hillary Clinton’s ballyhooed economics speech. It’s a little too late in the day for a really deep dive, but here are some preliminary observations.
First, the speech was incredibly wide ranging, and was described by the candidate as ‘about my economic proposals.’ But it was more a detailed laundry list of goals sprinkled with calls for a few specific initiatives and knit together by a (loose) narrative about how a series of historical developments that are (supposedly) unrelated to human decisions (like globalization), and a series of big mistakes (like regressive tax hikes and ill-considered regulatory rollback), have undermined the nation’s ability to generate both adequate economic growth and adequately rising wages for most workers.
Second, it’s hard to identify much of significance that’s genuinely new even in the catalog of objectives. Not that that’s necessarily bad, especially if you’re on the left of center, for much of the agenda adopted by Democrats since the turn of the century simply hasn’t been put into effect, or not to an especially great extent. So perhaps not surprisingly, Clinton’s speech was filled with material about boosting green energy’s role in the economy, closing tax loopholes that allegedly excessively reward much Wall Street pay and that supposedly encourage job and production offshoring, creating more incentives for longer-term and more productiveINVESTMENT by financiers, establishing an infrastructure bank, mandating more family-friendly workplace policies, raising the minimum wage (nation-wide), raising taxes on the wealthy, reversing the decline of unions, improving education for everyone from toddlers to displaced workers, encouraging job-creating investment in inner cities – I could go on.
This post was published at Wall Street Examiner by Alan Tonelson ‘ July 13, 2015.
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