Hillary and Donald–the Awfulness of the Whole Thing

Don’t pay much attention to how either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump say they will deal with foreign policy because it becomes pretty much inoperative in the specifics of any situation that may arise, advises Francis Menton in the Manhattan Contrarian. Focus instead on domestic economic policy. What each of the candidates says on the subject is a good indication of what he or she will attempt to do once in office.

Mr. Menton encapsulates the last debate and the “awfulness of the whole thing.” Hillary went first answering Chris Wallace’s question on the economy and how she intends to create more jobs and growth for the economy.

Hillary …proceeded to lay out a vision where all improvement in human economic condition comes from additional government spending, rules, and programs, all to be paid for by taxes and yet more taxes on the successful.  She didn’t put it in exactly those terms, but the idea that private economic activity is the source of wealth and needs to be allowed to flourish doesn’t seem ever to have occurred to her.  Here is the somewhat edited version:

I want us to have the biggest jobs program since World War II. Jobs in infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. I think we can compete with high wage countries and I believe we should. New jobs in clean energy. Not only to fight climate change, which is a serious problem but to create new opportunities and new businesses. I want us to do more to help small business, that’s where two-thirds of the new jobs are going to come from. I want to us raise the national minimum wage because people who work full time should not still be in poverty. And I sure do want to make sure women get equal pay for the work we do. I feel strongly that we have to have an education system that starts with preschool and goes through college. That’s why I want more technical education and community colleges, real apprenticeships to prepare young (people) for the jobs of the future. I want to make college debt-free and for families making less than $125,000, you will not get a tuition bill from a public college or a university. . . .  [W]e are going to have the wealthy pay their fair share. We’re going to have corporations make a contribution greater than they are now to our country. That is a plan that has been analyzed by independent experts which said that it could produce 10 million new jobs.

“This is an economic program truly worthy of a Venezuela or a North Korea, and couldn’t be more destructive on many levels, writes Mr Menton.

A government “jobs program” is going to create zillions of jobs in “advanced manufacturing”?  Can anybody give a single example where any government has succeeded at such an endeavor?  Indeed, this is exactly what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in the midst of failing at spectacularly.  And there will be lots of jobs in “clean energy,” to create “new opportunities and new businesses”!  Sure!  Dozens more Solyndras!  How ignorant do you have to be not to know that so-called “clean energy” jobs only exist by reason of massive government subsidies, which tells you that they destroy rather than create wealth, and that the so-called “opportunities” can only exist for Hillary’s politically-connected cronies like the “FOBs” and the donors to the Clinton Foundation.  And then we’ll price all poor kids completely out of the job market with a greatly increased minimum wage!  And then, deep into unsustainable and exploding deficits resulting from out-of-control entitlements and the new Obamacare program, let’s create another huge new entitlement of free college!  It can all be paid for by having the “wealthy pay their fair share.”  Does she have any idea that much of this money to be taken from the wealthy was going to be invested in businesses and now won’t be?

Donald Trump delivered a few good zingers –“[H]er plan is going to raise taxes and even double your taxes. Her tax plan is a disaster. . . .  We will have a massive, massive tax increase under Hillary Clinton’s plan” –before veering into irrelevant tangents and forgetting to mention what his plan would be or how it would be better than Hillary’s.

Our economy is burdened by “too high taxes, too much spending and too many regulations,” writes Mr Menton.

We have before our very eyes the living cases of Venezuela, not to mention Cuba and North Korea, to teach us what happens to an economy when the government takes everything over.  And we have the entire European Union to show us that when the government gets up to 50% of the economy and above everything goes into stagnation.