From the Washington Post (reformatted, emphasis mine):
Centering her presidential campaign on boosting incomes for middle-class Americans, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will begin unveiling an economic policy agenda designed to lift working families that have experienced years of wage stagnation and economic anxiety. In a major address in New York, the Democratic front-runner will lay out a diagnosis for why wages have been stuck and a framework to ensure that economic growth benefits more ordinary workers, according to campaign officials. “She believes that making sure the real incomes of everyday Americans are rising steadily and strongly is the defining economic challenge of our time,” said one campaign official, who previewed Clinton’s remarks on the condition of anonymity.
Clinton will endorse a host of popular Democratic policies, such as increasing the minimum wage and investing more in infrastructure. She will emphasize proposals tailored toward working women, one of her most important bases of support, such as expanding access to child care and paid family and sick leave. The ideas, in many ways, sound similar to the second-term agenda of President Obama, who faced an economic crisis during his first term and started to more directly address the nation’s long-running economic problems during his second. But he has struggled to pass major legislation with a Republican-dominated Congress.
Clinton will say she wants to build on his agenda, and, in working to craft an economic vision of her own, she’ll go further in her emphasis on giving women more flexibility to enter the workforce and on new government efforts to change corporations’ investment and pay decisions.
Right. I am not an economist in either real life OR on a blog, but being a member of said middle class, I see that no good will come of this. For you see, I know EXACTLY where the cost is going to come from: me and other middle class folks. As we have remarked for years, the Democrat mantra is the Socialist code and here she is certainly willing to be its Fascist kissing cousin – Government being in absolute charge of the economy without having to live up to the Communist “ownership of the means of production”. Clinton understands what Mussolini did – control is FAR better than ownership.
Couple of thoughts:
- Increasing the minimum wage – is she not learning anything from the socialist union SEIU’s attempt to “organize” fast food workers (where automated kiosks are going to replace humans, or buisnesses in SeaTac / Seattle / LA are cutting their workers back if not closing shop all together? I make the claim that this is NOT helping “working families” unless she thinks that unemployment or welfare is a better lifestyle.
- Investing more in infrastructure – as ubiquitous as “getting rid of waste and fraud”. THis will go to her Demcrat allies, the unions, with a lot of make-work. We already spent $1 Trillion on “stimulus – what did we get for it? Nothing, as far as most people can tell. Again, this is not going to be a case of “build it and they will come” – this should be the responsibility of the local level. And, once again, there will be tax hikes in order to pay for this – and it will come out of the working class’s paychecks, mark my words.
- expanding access to child care – yep, after all, they aren’t your children, they belong “to the Collective”. Hillary definitely believes in that old Village stuff – and make no mistake, the Village will be paying for it.
- paid family and sick leave – she just wants to shuck off the costs onto the backs of businesses; downshifting the cost of yet another welfare program onto the private sector. It, too, will come out of the workers’ paychecks.
And Hillary doesn’t get it. Each time you raise the cost of doing business, one of these things will happen:
- They will cut costs, somehow, or
- They will shut the door.
She doesn’t get it – a major reason for wage stagnation, the take home pay in the wallet, is that the price of being in business is continuously being upped by government continuously putting more regulations and requirements on those businesses. In a lot of cases, prices cannot be raised (a fact that is mostly tossed off by Progressives – ESPECIALLY Hillary who has never had to run one).
Every business has to make an economic decision as to the TOTAL remuneration for a worker – all the benefits they wish to give as part of someone’s package, their actual wages, plus the non-market impediments laid on them by Government. And when that latter one keeps rising, the other two must diminish. And given that much of that has been in mandated benefits, well, businesses have decided that they are not going to keep absorbing it (and in the IT community, we see companies, lately Disney, outsourcing their domestic workers for outsourced ones brought onshore by foreign companies – how’s THAT going to “raise wages”, dear Hillary?) and will pass those costs onto their workers. And thus, paychecks either stagnate as a result of it or go downward.
But Hillary, being the stealthy socialist she is as well as an Alinskyite accolade, will demonize companies at all levels (remember this when complaints came in about the cost of her HillaryCare: I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized small business in America’!” ). Yet, small business and startups are the economic engine of the US – how’s that going to work out for us?
Not with an attitude like that, is she “for the middle class”.
