Hillary Clinton has trouble speaking accurately about the economy. Lucky for her, Donald Trump is not good at setting the record straight.
Monday night’s debate provided a perfect demonstration of Hillary’s folly on the economy and Trump’s impotence in exploiting it. Hillary repeatedly wandered into economic fantasyland, and Trump was totally incapable of bringing her back.
Clinton tried to dodge the obvious charge that she nakedly flip-flopped on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade treaty with Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico and a handful of other countries. When Trump pointed out that she had called TPP the “Gold Standard,” before turning against it, Clinton just obfuscated. “Donald, I know you live in your own reality, but that is not the facts.”
But Trump was correct. A well-prepared candidate could have cited exactly where Clinton had praised the treaty in past. Most Republican candidates would have cited facts demonstrating how Clinton held one position when in power and another when on the campaign trail. Trump, however, doesn’t handle details like that well.
Also, Trump felt compelled to make it about himself. He accused Clinton, “you heard what I said about it and all of a sudden you were against it.” Clinton was expressing “concerns” about TPP, however, as early as May 2015, before Trump even announced. It would be more accurate to attribute her TPP switch to Bernie Sanders’ entrance into the race that month. But Trump tried to take the credit, rendering his critique of her flip-flop less true.
When Clinton later tried to escape the awkward trade topic, she pulled some logical jujitsu.
“Let’s stop for a second and remember where we were eight years ago,” Clinton deflected. “We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s. That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street and created a perfect storm.”
Yes, she was blaming the Bush tax cuts for the financial crisis. Blaming tax cuts for increasing inequality is plausible. Blaming tax cuts for deficits, fine. Blaming tax cuts for the financial crisis? A non-sequitur. It’s also a standard Democratic line.
Barack Obama in 2012 said Romney, “with even bigger tax cuts,” would “double down on the same trickle-down policies that led to the crisis in the first place.”
It was malarkey then, too. The Obama campaign’s “cite” for their claim tax cuts caused the financial crisis was an opinion piece by liberal writer Ezra Klein, then at the Washington Post. Klein explained, however, “I am absolutely not saying the Bush tax cuts led to the financial crisis. To my knowledge, there’s no evidence of that.”
The Post’s fact-checker dismantled Obama’s argument four years ago, but it remained a Democratic talking point. Clinton predictably rolled it out in the first debate, and Trump let it float by.
Clinton’s entire economic critique of Trump was as applicable or more applicable to Clinton. She described tax cuts as “trickle-down economics all over again.” Later she said, “I don’t think top-down works in America.”
She was actually attacking her own economic policies.
At the heart of Clinton’s economic plan is her industrial policy, best described as “corporatism.” She believes in top-down management of the economy that involves giving money to the big guys in the hope they spend some on the little guys.
Clinton in her primary attacked Bernie Sanders for opposing the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency Barack Obama once aptly called “a slush-fund for corporate welfare.” The agency, beloved on K Street and Wall Street, subsidizes U.S. exporters through taxpayer-backed financing to foreign buyers. Clinton has said she wants to “put Ex-Im Bank on steroids.”
As a senator, Clinton (heavily funded by lobbyists and executives at the company) showered earmarks on Corning Inc. Clinton has long advocated ethanol subsidies, and she supports all sorts of alternative-energy handouts.
She’ll never say she backs this corporate welfare in order to enrich donors — that’s merely a side benefit. Clinton’s justification: it creates jobs.
Loaning taxpayer money to Air China, who then hands it to Boeing in the expectation Boeing will use that money to hire people is literally trickle-down economics. Give money to corporations and wait for it to trickle down to the workingman. Give money to Archer Daniels Midland in hope it will trickle down to the farmer.
A conservative nominee who opposed corporate welfare and understands economic policy could have made that counterargument. Donald Trump didn’t, because he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he didn’t prepare. Also, Trump favors corporate welfare too (he famously and steadfastly loves the ethanol mandate), and probably doesn’t think “trickle down” is a bad concept.
Not understanding free-enterprise thought, Trump seems to buy into Clinton’s conflation of government giving money to people (as it does in her favored policy) and government not taking as much money from people (as it does when you reduce taxes).
Hillary Clinton is untethered from reality on economics. The major media will never call her out for it, leaving the job to her opponent. She’s drawn an opponent, however, who’s as lost on economics as she is.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
