The U.S. economy is in trouble, and desperately needs the help of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
At least that’s what she’d like you to believe.
Clinton delivered this information earlier in the week, at the start of a campaign tour through Iowa.
Interestingly, within twenty-four hours of her speech, a new Washington Post / ABC News poll showed Senator and rival presidential candidate Barack Obama moving out ahead of her for the first time, while the U.S. Department of Commerce released data showing a rise in construction projects during the month of October.
Nonetheless it’s important to examine the substance of her comments, because when it comes to economic policy, Mrs. Clinton represents a dramatic departure from the American way of life.
In her address, Clinton insisted that the economy is facing a crisis brought on by home foreclosures and rising oil prices. Here, she is partially accurate, as both the U.S. economy and the global economy have suffered from the fallout of the sub-prime mortgage industry.
Yet, despite the fact that oil prices have been unusually high for most of this year, the U.S. economy has seen virtually no corresponding rise in inflation. This is a fact that has continued to pleasantly surprise analysts both in the private sector, and at the federal reserve, and suggests that the economy on the whole is weathering the oil price “spike” amazingly well.
Mrs. Clinton went on in her address to state that America needs her experience in the White House, so as to adequately address these severe economic conditions, and without naming names she criticized what she sited as a “lack of experience” with her opponents.
Shortly afterward, Senator Barack Obama shot back, saying "My understanding is she wasn't Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. I don't know exactly what experience she's claiming," Obama then rightfully went on to issue a challenge to Mrs. Clinton, stating, "Rather than just assert experience, if she has specific differences with me in regard to economic policy then let's have that debate."
But Obama’s challenge leads to an important point: when Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks her mind on economic policy, as she would presumably need to do in a debate, the vision she puts forth bares little resemblance to the ways in which the U.S. economy actually works. Likewise, upon careful analysis, her ideas would seem to have appeal with only the most far left-leaning of Democratic primary voters.
Such moments of transparency seem to be rare with Mrs. Clinton. But earlier this year, she did on a few occasions reveal some of her economic views, if only in broad generalities.
For example, back in June of this year, Clinton was quizzed at the Democratic candidates’ “Faith and Values” forum, televised on CNN. While responding to the panelists‘ questions about “poverty in America,” Mrs. Clinton was critical of nearly every sector of American society: the “adult society” has failed, she claimed; “churches have failed;” “the free market has failed;” “we’ve all failed.”
In terms of creating an economically “just” society, America is a big failure as far as Senator Clinton is concerned. And her anecdote for correcting these failures? “Something needs to be taken away from some people.”
Think of the magnitude of this statement - - “Something needs to be taken away from some people.” But what exactly is it that needs to be taken away? And from whom? And to whom should it be given, so we can finally achieve “justice?”
In another address earlier this summer in Manchester, NH, Clinton began laying the groundwork for her argument to raise taxes on “the wealthy,” saying “Let’s be clear, it’s not as if America hasn’t been successful in the past six years…”
But then, without any contemplation of the economic policies that may have helped create the “success” of the past six years, she decried the notion that America is an “ownership society,” lamented that, in reality, we live in an “on your own society,” and expressed her goal of creating a “we’re-in-this-together-society.” She concluded by saying that, for her, a “we’re-in-this-together-society” is one of “shared responsibility,” and “shared prosperity.”
So in Senator Clinton’s view, “we’ve all failed,” and “something needs to be taken away from some people,” and we should all aspire to a nation of “shared responsibility” and “shared prosperity.”
In the rare moments where she speaks of economics, Clinton’s remarks are devoid of any references to the essential, yet immaterial components that make our economy unique and vibrant. Virtues like personal responsibility, risk-taking, charity, commitment, personal achievement, altruism, and pride of ownership, are the things that make our economy function, and they are innate within the hearts of most working Americans. But these sorts of “economic goods” emanate from individidual humans, not from government agencies, and consequently Mrs. Clinton seems unable to relate to them.
If Mrs. Clinton does in fact become her party’s presidential nominee, let’s hope her Republican rival will challenge her on these things, as Senator Obama was suggesting. Americans need to see her visions for our nation's economic future, and then make an important, and informed choice.
