Tuesday, November 8, 2016

A recipe obviously founded on intentional decline

Stephen Moore at Townhall on the five worst features of Madame BleachBit's economic policy:

1. Raise the Minimum Wage to $12 or Even $15 an Hour: She might as well call this the Teenage Job Elimination Act. Even using the methodology of the liberal Congressional Budget Office shows that a $12 minimum wage would reduce the number of starter jobs by as many as 770,000. Seattle recently raised its minimum wage to $11 and is headed to $15. An independent assessment by the University of Washington finds that so far the law has had the "negative unintended consequence" of fewer hours worked and fewer jobs. Is this what we want for the nation?
2. Hike Income Tax Rates: There is virtually no economic philosophy that holds that raising taxes will help the economy. But Hillary Clinton is going to give it a try -- to the tune of $1.5 trillion sucked out of the economy.

3. Subsidize 500 Million Solar Panels: We tried these green-energy handouts under Barack Obama and they were a failure. (Remember Solyndra?)

4. Offer Free College Tuition: It's one of the greatest financial scandals in America today -- the exorbitant fees that universities and colleges are charging students. Some colleges now cost an annual $60,000 for room, board and tuition, and the average cost is near $30,000. But if the students and the families aren't paying these costs, taxpayers will, and costs will spike even higher. Universities will raise their tuitions, as they have every time the government provides more subsidies through Pell Grants. A better idea would be to require every school to freeze tuition for four or five years as a condition of receiving any federal aid. Purdue University has done this. Why not require schools with billion-dollar-plus endowments to use some of that money to lower the tuition for families?
5. Increase Social Security Benefits: Clinton wants to fatten benefits to certain senior citizens, and she wants to raise the tax on Social Security to "pay for it." Really? The system is already tens of trillions of dollars in the red, according to the Social Security Administration's own actuaries. Are we now going to increase the outflow and make even bigger benefit promises? Clinton would also apply the payroll tax of 12.4 percent on wages of up to $250,000 (up from about $110,000 today), which would be one of the biggest tax increases of all time. Let's rein in the entitlement programs, not expand them.
Madame BleachBit seems bent on making collective realization of LITD's First Law of Economics - the money has to come from somewhere - as painful as possible.

The sum total of the above five "ideas" is an acceleration of the hobbling of post-America that has been the overarching vision of the regime that has been gripping the nation's throat for the last eight years.

Those post-Americans who still cherish freedom must wage total war against it.
 
 
 


4 comments:

  1. Please do so under her as the one who holds the nuclear codes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Those five policies - each and all - must never be implemented.

    ReplyDelete
  3. We'll see. You seem to turn a blind eye to automation and its accelerating affect on jobs worldwide. I know, go out and have something designed & built. By robots.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You got your meat, you got your potatoes, so let's all puff on a legal doob and smell your stew before we eat it.

    ReplyDelete