The Patriot Post® · Hillary Blames Republicans for Obama's Economy

By Nate Jackson ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/36373-hillary-blames-republicans-for-obamas-economy-2015-07-14

Hillary Clinton finally laid out a platform for her campaign Monday, focusing on her plan to solve America’s economic woes. Just kidding. She didn’t really propose anything new so much as complain about the state of an economy that “still isn’t delivering for most Americans,” while inciting a little class warfare along the way. Of course, she’s done quite alright for herself, thank you very much, but that’s beside the point, right?

“Previous generations of Americans built the greatest economy and strongest middle class the world has ever known on the promise of a basic bargain: If you work hard and do your part, you should be able to get ahead,” Hillary said. “But over the past several decades, that bargain has eroded. Our job is to make it strong again.”

That bargain has indeed eroded over the last six-plus years of Barack Obama’s “recovery” (eight years if we include Democrat control of Congress beginning in 2007), during which the government spent $1 trillion it didn’t have in “stimulus” money, took over the health insurance market, institutionalized “too big to fail” through financial regulations and raised taxes on small businesses. Those policies only served to harm the middle class by undermining job and wage growth.

Clinton launched an attack on potential Republican rival Jeb Bush. “Now, you may have heard Governor Bush say Americans just need to work longer hours,” she mocked. “Well, he must not have met very many American workers. Let him tell that to the nurse who stands on her feet all day, or the teacher who’s in that classroom or the trucker who drives all night. Let him tell that to the fast-food worker marching in the streets for better pay. They do not need a lecture. They need a raise.”

Bush’s “people need to work longer hours” remark was a perhaps inartful way of pointing out how badly Obama botched the economy. ObamaCare in particular hurt workers through its requirement that employers provide insurance to workers who put in more than 30 hours a week. For the part-time waitress or big box store worker, that means they can no longer get more than 29 hours — because mandating insurance doesn’t mean an employer can afford to provide it. And far too much of the job growth under Obama has been part-time work for people who want full-time jobs.

Indeed, as Bush later put it, “If we’re going to grow the economy, people need to stop being part-time workers. They need to have access to greater opportunities to work.”

In fact, Hillary herself complained that women need to work more. “The movement of women into the American workforce over the past 40 years was responsible for more than $3.5 trillion in economic growth,” she said. “But that progress has stalled.”

That’s a tacit admission that the labor force participation rate has remained stuck at record lows during the “Obama Recovery.” An awful lot of Americans need to be working more than zero hours a week, but Clinton’s plan won’t make that happen.

She insists we can’t go back to the failed policies of the past while offering exactly that. Her great ideas include raising the minimum wage and increasing infrastructure spending, neither of which truly boosts the economy. The minimum wage demonstrably hurts it.

“For 35 years Republicans have argued that if we give more wealth to those at the top by cutting their taxes and letting big corporations write their own rules, it will trickle down … to everyone else,” she railed. “Yet every time they have a chance to try that approach, it explodes the national debt, concentrates wealth even more, and does practically nothing to help hardworking Americans. Twice now in the past 20 years a Democratic president has had to come in and clean up the mess left behind.”

That depends on the meaning of “clean up.” After Ronald Reagan’s policies kicked off 25 years of economic growth, Bill Clinton raised taxes and sowed the seeds of the 2008 economic collapse by applying affirmative action to the home-lending industry. That collapse was blamed on George W. Bush, and Obama’s “solutions” only perpetuated a stagnant economy.

More important, remember that “trickle down” is simply the Democrat pejorative for capitalism. Reaganomics, which Hillary specifically targets, meant that people keep more of their own money. Tax cuts are not “giving more wealth to those at the top,” as Hillary would like us to believe. When people keep their own money, they use it to grow the economy — even if they save that money. Government doesn’t grow the economy; it can only rearrange it with your money, picking winners and losers along the way.

Hillary says she wants to “build a growth and fairness economy,” but that won’t happen by blaming capitalism and advocating socialism.