On January 18, 2015, Ken Thomas writes on The Huffington Post:
Inside the Democratic Party, economic policy is often seen as a contest between President Barack Obama’s track record and the anti-Wall Street approach advocated by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
As Hillary Rodham Clinton heads for an expected 2016 run for president, her allies are pointing her toward something in-between.
A group of Clinton advisers offered a detailed economic agenda last week that aims to help raise wages for millions of workers and close the gap between rich and poor. The policy road map was produced at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank stocked with veterans of the Bill Clinton and Obama administrations. It appeared to target those who are disenchanted with Obama and skeptical that Clinton effectively would police Wall Street and champion middle-class workers.
“While there are large forces, globalization, technology and more, that are creating large challenges for many workers, there is no excuse or intellectual basis for fatalism,” said Larry Summers, one of its authors and a former treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton who later worked for Obama.
The subject is clearly on Hillary Clinton’s mind. In her first tweet in more than a month, she posted this Friday: “Attacking financial reform is risky and wrong. Better for Congress to focus on jobs and wages for middle-class families.”
Campaigning for Democrats last fall, she often spoke of the need to return to an economic system of broadly shared prosperity.
That goal has eluded Obama, even though he is able to point to a rebounding economy, falling unemployment rates and lower gas prices. Obama, in Tuesday’s State of the Union, plans to propose raising the capital gains rate on the wealthy and eliminating a tax break on inheritances. The plan is a nonstarter with Republicans, but Obama will make the case for using the additional revenue for new tax credits and other benefits for the middle class.
Warren, in a speech this month to the AFL-CIO, said that despite stronger economic growth and a soaring stock market, “America’s middle class is in deep trouble.” Liberals say the problem of stagnant wages require urgent action.
“We need to be extremely aggressive to deal with income and wealth inequality,” said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who may seek the Democratic presidential nomination.
Republicans such as Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney are beginning to articulate their own agenda for addressing income inequality, reflecting an expected argument that Obama’s policies have not helped millions of workers.
“Their liberal policies are good every four years for a campaign, but they don’t get the job done,” Romney said in a speech last week to the Republican National Committee.
Clinton’s template has been the 1990s, during her husband’s two terms, and Summers noted that many of the ideas in the report built upon the “Putting People First” agenda from Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
It also cited some of the chief parts of Obama’s economic program, such as efforts to raise the federal minimum wage, spend more on roads, bridges and public works, offer paid leave for workers and help students pay for college.
But the report also offered other ideas with broad appeal in the party: tax credits for middle-class families, incentives for employees to partake in profit-sharing, attention to collective bargaining rights and tying the repayment of student loans to a graduate’s income earned over two decades or more.
Those responsible for the report have strong Clinton connections.
Along with Summers, the commission included the center’s president and CEO, Neera Tanden, a former Hillary Clinton policy adviser; former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a leader of a political action committee set to back a Clinton candidacy; and Steven Rattner, who was chief adviser to Obama’s auto bailout task force and is a longtime Clinton donor.
Clinton, who returns to the speaking circuit in Canada this coming week, has said she would offer a “very specific agenda” if she runs for president.
Some progressives said that while the new report offered good ideas, it had deficiencies. Most notably, it does not advocate for the breakup of Wall Street banks, which Warren has sought, and does not push for a higher minimum wage beyond the $10.10 pushed by Obama.
Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org, noted the role of lobbyists only had a passing reference in the findings.
“In some areas, the report represents a largely Washington establishment perspective, and isn’t as bold as folks outside the Beltway are probably ready for,” Galland said.
Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said much of the report offered ideas that could unite broad parts of the Democratic coalition. He said it built upon a growing understanding in the party, in the aftermath of the November elections, that simple economic growth is not enough to lift the fortunes of middle-class workers.
“I don’t think the 2014 midterms were some sort of fluke. If you don’t give people a reason to get up and go vote for you, I’d expect them to sit down and stay home or vote for somebody else,” he said. “So you can’t assume based on demographics or race or income class that the electorate is going to support you. … You have to do precisely the kind of policy work that this group is offering us.”
There are two planks in the Hillary Clinton platform that stand out and depart from the same old same old that is put forth by politicians. Yes, sadly, there are a number of platform planks that would grow the power of government to coerce business corporations to raise wages as well as invest taxpayer extractions in infrastructure to create jobs, without the stipulation that the companies bidding for the government contracts are fully employee owned. And while Hillary Clinton has yet to address the issue of concentrated capital ownership and advocate universal individual ownership for EVERY citizen of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets simultaneously with the growth of the economy, one of her platform planks “endorses more favorable tax treatment for worker-owned firms,” and proposes “‘estate tax relief’ for corporate founders who convert their companies to worker-owned enterprises when they retire or die.”
While the above addresses the concentrated capital ownership issue––the source of income and wealth inequality––Hillary Clinton only addresses aspects of this around the periphery and avoids the REAL issue. She, as with the majority of politicians seeking the presidency as well as in the Senate and Congress, are millionaires because they own capital assets, yet none EVER advocate to reform the system to empower EVERY citizen to acquire personal capital asset ownership on the basis that the earnings from the investments will pay off the initial insured, interest-free capital credit loans, which is the feasible and practical solution to broadening capital ownership.
While Hillary Clinton recognizes that “incomes for the bottom 90 percent of the population have not kept up with productivity or per capita GDP growth,” she fails to understand why and realize that tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are constantly eliminating the necessity for human labor and at the same time devaluing the worth of labor as “machines”––the product of technological invention and innovation––shift the relative productive input from human labor to non-human “labor,” which is presently narrowly OWNED by a politically powerful wealthy ownership class minority.
Hillary Clinton does endorse “closing corporate tax and inheritance tax loopholes,” but to what extent is not stated. Ideally, ALL such loopholes should be closed, as well as all subsidies should be eliminated.
As for “estate tax relief,” inheritance and gift taxes should be replaced with a transfer tax that would be imposed on the recipients whose holdings exceeded $1 million, thus encouraging the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes, teachers, health workers, police, other public servants, military veterans, artists, the poor and the disabled.
The Commission On Inclusive Prosperity’s report appears to focus on Americans who are already employed and not impoverished, but struggling with stagnant incomes and retirement insecurity, but largely ignores the necessity to empower EVERY citizen, regardless of economic circumstances, to acquire individual ownership of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets on the basis that past savings are not required, nor reduction in wages or other incomes and benefits to qualify for insured, interest-free capital credit loans, repayable out of future dividend earning fully paid out from the investment in successful corporations are who are growing the economy.
The author of this article acknowledges that the report is ” in some respects an exciting plan, but lacks a realistic path for enacting it”––claiming that Hillary Clinton’s economic message is “largely built out of politically unrealistic proposals.”
Well, there is a politically realistic set of policy proposals that respects the private property principles our nation was founded on and takes no property from those who presently own property. The policies are embodied in the agenda of the Just Third Way and in the platform of the Unite America Party, which are open to ANY politician or political party to adopt. The central economic policies in this platform are contained in the proposed Capital Homestead Act.
While Hillary Clinton offers us hope that her eyes can be opened and that she would take up and lead the cause, if she did in fact endorse and advocate for the passage of the Capital Homestead Act, this would be a monumental political achievement and would put our nation on the path to inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.
The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate social monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.
Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/, http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jtw-graphicoverview-2013.pdf and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/. See http://cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ and http://cesj.org/…/uploads/Free/capitalhomesteading-s.pdf.
Support the Unite America Party Platform, published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/platform-of-the-unite-ame_b_5474077.html as well as Nation Of Change at http://www.nationofchange.org/platform-unite-america-party-1402409962 and OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Platform-of-the-Unite-Amer-by-Gary-Reber-Party-Leadership_Party-Platforms-DNC_Party-Platforms-GOP-RNC_Party-Politics-Democratic-140630-60.html.
