Clinton’s ‘Fiscal Responsibility’ A Sham, Critics Say
WASHINGTON - New York Sen. Hillary Clinton vows that as president, she’d return the country to “fiscal responsibility,” but critics charge that her proposals could blow a hole worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the deficit and even would provide a tax cut to some of America’s richest people.
The Democratic front-runner says her torrent of promises - which would cost hundreds of billions of dollars - is paid for.
“What Senator Clinton has said throughout the campaign is that she will pay for every single proposal without increasing the deficit,” said Brian Deese, a policy analyst with the Clinton campaign. “Focusing on a commitment to pay-as-you-go would be a dramatic change from the Bush administration.”
But pledging not to increase the deficit - as opposed to reducing it - isn’t real fiscal responsibility, critics say, questioning Clinton’s method of payment for her most prominent, most expensive proposals:
- To pay for her $100-billion-a-year-plus health care plan, Clinton would allow President Bush’s tax cuts for those who earn more than $250,000 a year to expire, as scheduled, in 2010.
- To pay for her $25-billion-a-year retirement security plan and for half of her $8 billion-a-year college tuition assistance plan, she’d freeze the estate tax at 2009 levels.
Allowing Bush’s tax cuts to expire in order to pay for health care doesn’t do anything to restore fiscal responsibility because it’s spending money that otherwise would flow into federal coffers to reduce the deficit, said Len Burman, the director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the center-left Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.
“Senator Clinton and President Bush agree on the right level of deficits,” Burman said. “They disagree on whether you should have tax cuts for rich people or health care.”
Lee Farris, a federal tax policy coordinator for United for a Fair Economy, a left-leaning Boston-based advocacy group, said that Clinton’s health plan “is not deficit-neutral, it’s deficit-worsening. . . . That money in 2011(from the expired tax cuts) is already claimed. When people spend money for programs already agreed to, they’re counting on that money being there in 2011.”
Worse, critics say, Clinton’s pledge to freeze the estate tax at 2009 levels would cost the Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars.
That’s because although the estate tax is set to expire in 2010, it’s due to return in 2011 - at 2001 levels, which are far higher than the 2009 levels that Clinton wants to keep.
Setting the estate tax at 2009 levels would cost the Treasury $29 billion in 2012 and a total of $232 billion by 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office. From 2012 to 2021, it would cost more than $400 billion, according to an independent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a center-left Washington policy group.
“Under current law, it’s a tax cut, and it’s going to the wealthiest 2 percent of estates,” said Aviva Aron-Dine, a policy analyst at the center.
The Clinton camp says that it’s unfair to examine her proposals under current law.
Deese points out that the Bush administration’s budget projections include the expectation that Bush’s tax cuts will be extended and that the estate tax won’t return as scheduled. And the Clinton campaign says that large front-end investments in health care will lead to savings later on through the use of technology, improvement in individual health and a more efficient system.
“The choices in this election are stark,” Deese said. “Republicans want to extend the Bush tax cuts for upper-income Americans permanently. Senator Clinton wants to use some of that that money to make important investments. That’s a big choice.”
Clinton is hardly alone in sidestepping fiscal realities. Her chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, has proposed at least $181 billion in new annual spending on middle-class tax cuts, health care and retirement and energy plans. Many of his plans also rely on the “savings” allegedly generated by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, plus raising other taxes. Some question, however, whether his new taxes would raise enough to pay for his proposals.
On the Republican side, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney recently proposed enormous increases in defense spending. Neither said how they’d pay for them.
Given the budget deficit, the costs of the Iraq war and resupplying the military and the massive expenditures looming for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, it’s likely that the next president will have to do something similar to what the first Bush administration did in 1990 and the Clinton administration did in 1993: a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to ensure real fiscal stability, said Joseph Minarik, a Clinton administration budget official who’s now the senior vice president of the Committee for Economic Development, a centrist economic policy group in Washington.
“The problem is, both parties want to talk about goodies. They don’t want to talk about hard choices,” Burman said.
A Sampling of Clinton’s Proposed Spending:
Annual new spending:
- Health care: $100 billion-plus
- Retirement: $20-$25 billion
- Energy: $10 billion
- Family leave/child care: $1.75 billion
- Tuition assistance: $8 billion
- Transportation/transit: $2.5 billion
- Education: $5 billion
- Scientific research: $2.8 billion
Other new spending:
- Energy: $50 billion
- Foreclosure assistance: $1 billion
- Passenger rail: $1 billion
- Affordable housing: $1 billion
© McClatchy Newspapers 2007
A vote for hillary is a vote for more of the same…(as we all know)
we’re quoting a “bunch of charts” that mean absolutely nothing, nobody will remember any of it tomorrow when it turns out to be smoke and mirror, lie-a-paloosa.
Down the memory hole.
what a heartbreaking joke.
The sham is the American media who let our politicians get away with lying. There is no accountability in our political process because the media doesn’t do it’s job. Politicians used to be afraid of the media. Now the media are their allies.
Hoa binh
Just follow the money. Her supporters are current Bush supporters. Same-o, same-o.
Want to pay for the Goodies? Slash the Military budget, close the 700 plus overseas military bases and bring the troops and All That Money home!
OMG…just LOOK at ‘that-Woman’ (who I, at-least, could swear to “…never having sex-with”). [So, a bad-pun/joke…just don’t pile-on with crap about my ‘objectification’/Chauvinism…if She wasn’t the power-mad/cold-assed bitch she was/is, we’d not ever have initially been ‘gifted’ with BushCo in 2000…]
OTOH, as sick/disgusted as I have been looking-at, hearing, and realizing what boy-George has done (and in my-name!) these last/long 7-years, I simply cannot believe/stand (while it is slowly sinking-in) what this-Clinton would ‘Be’ — such that ‘Things’ could actually, somehow, get WORSE…!
[Please, please…let some-Miracle bring Kucinich to the forefront…!
LET MY PEOPLE GO!, dammit…!!]
I get a kick out of the photo accompanying this article. I’m told that Fox and other big outlets often pick less-than-flattering photos of people, since it has a cheap subliminal psychological smear effect. She almost looks vaguely Liebermanesque here. Wild-eyed shots are good too.
On Clintonomics, I’ve wondered how much of the Clinton miracle was due to being the first cyber-president, presiding over a unique boom time in world history (the rise of the internet). If Billary didn’t have that going for Clintonomics, would it have really been the “glory days” for the middle-class?
Mrs. Clinton’s deficit will be much more than most people realize by the simple fact that she will continue the expansion of the American Empire with more wars, siphon off even more money to those who are paying for her campaign i.e. the insurance companies and big corporations who are destroying the middle class.
McDee, YESSS! With the bloated military budget that the U.S. has, its citizens could have free health care just as other industrialized countries do — and free higher education.
Instead, our tax money goes to the military-industrial complex for war profits for the super rich so they can continue declaring war on whomever they please for further enrichment of their finances.
Y’all might try living in reality for a while. Its not so bad - its actually easier to deal with if you don’t hide from it.
Kucinich will never be President. Even if he won the nomination, swing voters will never vote for him and we’ll have another Republican President. Even if he won the Presidency, he’d be unable to further an agenda as his views have such little support in Congress. You’re wasting your time and weakening the party’s chances of winning the White House. Why can’t you see that?
Hillary is not substantially different from Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Biden, etc., but progressives routinely single her out for bitter acerbic attacks. Is she really that bad? No, she’s not. But the Republicans fear her candidacy, hence their constant attacks. Why to progressives go along with it? The same reason they promote Kucinich’s campaign. Disconnection from reality.
Clinton proposes to freeze in place (by 2009) the Bush estate tax cut for the super rich. Had she not intervened, this tax cut would have expired, and the estate tax would have reverted to a higher rate just two years later, in 2011. Cynically, Clinton claims that her scheme is not to save money for the super rich, but to raise money to pay for her giveaway program for retirees and college kids. The truth is, freezing in place the Bush estate tax cut at the 2009 level would cost the rest of us hundreds of billions in just ten years!
Is Hillary stupid, or does she just think we are stupid?
She’s a damned liar. Period. And a foul mouth. Just ask anyone who has worked under her, in Arkansas and DC.
Our US political system is not now meet to the challenges we face. All the various candidates are like checkers on a 64 place board. They can move around, pushing money from here to there, while the house burns down around the table the board rests upon.
What’s required is a unity around recognizing and admitting the obvious, that we are larger than the problems our systems have saddled us with as a function of their inadequacies.
We need to collectively admit the larger, motive, effective agenda by means of which all our challenges can be solved simultaneously. That means we have to stop and accept a willingness to redefine all our systems, including the very nature of the dollar, to assure a success that affirms the legitimacy of the concerns and needs of all. There are no other options that are not just more of the same taking from one to serve another.
The key tool is the choice to define a national purpose, which would be a fundamental decision to be the source of harmony for all our nation and all the world.
Love IS real.
Do you really think that voting for either the Democratic or Republican candidates is going to change anything at all?? Big money has bought them all, including most of Congress. It is time for real change not just a change of face. The course of US foreign policy has not changed over the past several Presidents, either Republican or Democratic. So what makes you think it will now? Money trumps democracy and responsible government.
Yeah, Clinton is a joke. She does and says what she needs to do and say to get elected. There is nothing deep about her. Just another puppet with her strings being pulled.
When Hillary made like she wanted to give us
Health care, she brought in the Wolf of the
Chicken Coop to share the goods with.
The president of Aetna Insurance Company,
by the name of Zoe Baird. Zoe was to have
her Company run and benefit, from the Health care
that is supposed to be for us the working classes. That was nothing like the government
run Health care in Canada, more like a Clinton
for profit..like White-water..
Give us a break, print the facts on the
Billaries.
To all you Clinton haters: Simply go to Real Clear Politics and READ THE POLLS. The ONLY poll where its close is IOWA.
Now some will yell, “It is all a plot! You can’t trust the polls!”
Dream on.
HRC is positioning herself in the middle because that is the ONLY WAY FOR HER TO WIN THE PRESIDENCY at this time.
Once she gains the nomination she will cut the Republican candidate into mincemeat. None of them stand a chance. Very weak field.
She will then go on to be one of the greatest presidents ever and will position herself just left of center.
You heard it here.
gavingourley: Wake up! You are on “party addiction” when you should be on what’s best for the country and it’s people! You apparently like politics as usual. You should go Republican hardline or Dem lite–they are damn near the same!
rickerando: So, I guess for you it’s all about winning and not about principle, eh? Your thinking and the whole fucking polling thing is what is going to stick this country even further in the shit. Why don’t you and gavingourley get together and do some research and throw away the crystal balls!
No budget can fix Bush treason and Treasury raid, wash it all off, Vote out the debt! all of it those that owe us since WWI, and all personal debt, start fresh,,,,,!!! and dicide where our money should truly be going, Permenant solar power stations, would be a start, owned by WE the People, just Like the OIL that is We the Peoples, Nationalize big oink OIL, and MEDICINE, the Profit motive is outdated in an ever shrinking world, ” ..the world has enough for everones needs-not enough for everyones greeds…” Mohatma Gandi
Celebrity:
Stay Cool, dude.
You gotta win first, then “real” principles will/can be used. See, most Americans can’t stand to hear the truth. (Perhaps I should say UNDERstand, sigh …)
Though I DO wish Bill would vanish for the rest of the campaign.
Merryoldsoul:
Don’t worry, HRC will have the best minds in America working on the budget/economy when she is President. It might take EIGHT YEARS to get back on track though.
Hear that celebrity?!
Who knows, maybe THEN Obama will be ready.
rickerando,
Hillary, the DLC in general, is RESISTING the center — pulling it to the right. The majority of this country believes Iraq was a disaster, our economy is flawed, and this administration should be IMPEACHED. The majority, I suspect, is also warming up to single-payer health care.
They’re either corrupted by lobbyists, totally disconnected from ordinary Americans, or brainwashed into Manchurian Candidates by handlers with ulterior motive — or a little of each.
Conserve ink … just shorten the headline to “Clinton a sham.”
Read Chomsky …. he’s been making the point for a couple of decades now that the majority of Americans favor single-payer health care. That’s been true for a long, long time. And it tells you a lot about our so-called political system that positions held by 60% or 70% or so of the American people are viewed as ‘non-starters’ by our political system. Single payer health care has been Chomsky’s example of that for a long time. Ending the Iraq war and impeaching the crooks are a couple more recent examples.
If Hillary or any of the other leading Democrats win, that is not a win for us. It means some nice cushy jobs for them, and lots of opportunities for them to get rich at our expense. But they don’t give a damn about us.
I’ve already celebrated a Clinton win once in my life, only to watch afterwards as he made the trade deals that send our jobs overseas and he started illegal wars. I’ve watched as he made deals that supported his buddies who could pay to stay overnight in the Lincoln bedroom, while the rest of us sufferred through a ‘jobless recovery’ and wages that actually went down in real terms. I’ve watched while he passed the first anti-terror bills that took away our rights, and while he brought in the federal death penalty.
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, sold it at a garage sale ages ago.
The basic fact is that a win for the Democrats is not a win for us. Get that point, and stop voting Democrat!
PS … and Bill was the LIBERAL of the couple. Hillary was always the rich girl who went to a private school and who was a Republican until it became politically convenient to be a Democrat for her husband’s political career. Hillary will screw us far worse that Bill ever did. At least Bill grew up working class before he sold out. Hillary never had anything to sell out in the first place since she was always a rich girl Republican.
Anyone hear an echo in hear? Remember when the standard Republican reply to anyone who criticized Bush was to call them Bush-haters? Notice the flood of comments in recent days where the democrat sycophants use EXACTLY the same technique against anyone who dares to criticize their disgusting party or their anointed one (who looks like Death herself these days … get her a black hood and a sickle.)
One of the first things you learn when you are around Democrats is that they are EXACTLY like the Republicans. They use exactly the same techniques. Arguing with a Democrat is exactly like arguing with a Republican. Both are such sheeple that they have to have their great leaders give them their talking points for the day. Try to run an independent campaign against either, and they’ll both use exactly the same political dirty tricks to win at all costs.
People who haven’t lived paycheck to paycheck (or worse) simply don’t get it. Or at least they pretend they don’t get it.
I, certainly, can imagine what it would be like if daddy was worth millions, every door was opened to me, I could have attended medical school and become a surgeon, etc.
And I guess that’s the part that bothers me more than anything. If cost of education and family finances were never an issue for me, I probably would have really gone on to do something grand in our culture: worked on a cure for AIDS, cancer, world hunger, invented new surgical techniques, etc. Become a politician? What a waste of opportunity for those who could have done something to genuinely help people instead. They’ve been doing far more harm than good — perhaps since some remote time in the past that we left the chieftain/council era of human history.
COMarc-
> “the majority of Americans favor single-payer health care.”
Only if you first explain to them what it is and don’t let Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh get into the discussion.
The truth is that most Americans do not know what single-payer health care means. And if you try to tell them about it, you are going to have all the weight of the single largest pot of money in the US - the insurance industry - plus the Right-wing banshees plus the entire corporate punditocracy coming down on you like a ton of shit bricks. Which is not a good way to run for president, if you actually care about winning.
> “The basic fact is that a win for the Democrats is not a win for us.”
It seems pretty clear that you will count a win for the Republicans as a victory for yourself, or whatever you think yourself a part of.
“New York Sen. Hillary Clinton vows that as president, she’d return the country to “fiscal responsibility,” but critics charge that her proposals could blow a hole worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the deficit and even would provide a tax cut to some of America’s richest people.”
Sure and I’ll just bet those critics of hers are Rethuglicans!!
And you can bet your Bippy, a WIN for Democrats is a BIG Win for ALL of us even the stuborn procrastinating Rethugs!
I didn’t read this article and few of the comments, but I just had to comment on the photo of Hillary! I know it is not about appearances, but if people are going to minimize Kucinich for his stature and appearance, MY GOD, how could anyone support this Wretch? What I’m talking about!
peace,
st john
rickerando @ 8:02 pm.
“To all you Clinton haters: Simply go to Real Clear Politics and READ THE POLLS.”
Maybe you should take your own advice, Rick:
“According to a new Zogby poll, if the election was held today, and it was between Hillary Clinton and any of the five main GOP contenders, she’d lose. That’s right. McCain, Romney, Giuliani, Thompson, and Huckabee would all beat her, if you buy the results of this national survey.”
As I mentioned before, if Kucinich was on the ballot in November ‘08, he’d probably unite a critical mass of Democrats and progressives here in Minnesota. There would be some Vichy Dems who’d vote Republican or try to smear him, and some diehard progressives who’d still avoid anything labelled Democrat (and not without reason), but I believe he’d have critical mass to win over any Republican in the running.
Hillary, of course, is a “set job” by the right-leaning MSM. A crypto-neocon, takes too much money from lobbyists, and has clearly fractured the progressive/left/populist and arguably centrist Middle America.
CoMarc: That’s right. But the more genuinely noble the cause, the more shrill the corporate-right looks.
IKE - it hurts my eyes, and therefore I VERY LIKELY wont read it, sorry.
Namaste
__ __ __ __ We must be the change
__ __ __ __ we wish to see in the world __ Gandhi
IKE I tried very hard to read your post, and I gave up after the first couple of paragraphs - my eyes still hurt.
IKE- Here’s the corrected link for editing HTML formating effects:
Namaste
__ __ __ __ We must be the change
__ __ __ __ we wish to see in the world __ Gandhi
The Hillary bashers here don’t get the essential reality of America. Our country is profoundly conservative, religious, rich, staid, gullible, manipulated by AM radio and television, fearful of the rest of the world, violent, racist, etc. etc. etc. This is painful to write, but true.
Hillary is my Senator here in NY, and she has been tepid, overly careful, totally focused on the national electoral posturing. It has been too reluctant to take on the war. But if you add up the votes, she has been a huge difference from D’Amato, her longtime, conservative, Republican predecessor.
Listen, people that read Common Dreams stories, we are on the left, but we have to know how to unite for a victory. That is, unite with the center, and gain new recruits from the dissatisfied right. Our failure to do that is why there have only been two Democratic presidents among the last seven Presidents.
We screw ourselves because we are incapable of seeing the big picture and uniting for the common good. Let’s all agree to be part of a winning coalition…we despeerately need a Democrat to win a year from now.
The majority want Bush AND Cheney impeached, believe this war was illegal, and probably want single-payer.
Hillary is charged with tugging the country to the right. She’s part of the catch-and-divert schema. They’re hoping that disillusioned Americans only fall so far from the tree.
We’re screwed because too many crypto-neocons and millionaires control BOTH parties.
Paul Branscher, it is such a symptom of our problem when people on the left imply that the two pafrties are basically the same. Was Gore-Bush 2000 basically just a beauty contest, six of one, half a dozen of the other? Kerry-Bush 2004 not a real choice? In fact there were massive differences and horrible results when Bush emerged as the president each time.
Would voting in a Hillary against Rudy contest be a waste, because they are basically identical? Not at all. We all know that the stakes will be so high, the direction of the country will be at stake, the Supreme Court appointments, the energy policies, health care, the likelihood of more Republican wars, etc.
I support the Cheney impeachment, but it is pretty clear today that America will not elect the candidate who demands it. Not at this time. So stop playing right into the game of the Republican power brokers. Our country desperately needs 60 million people to unite around the Democaratic nominee, whoever it is…be one of them.
By the way, I think that this photograph of Hillary is the perfect one to spread in any anti-Hillary campaigns: She looks like she is really mad, or at least terribly confused.
David,
We need someone who can issue real change — why insist it be a “Democrat”? Might be an Independent, a Green, even a rogue Republican (stranger things have happened in the course of history). We’re starting to get beyond the point of partisanship.
I don’t think the country really had a choice in ‘00. As others have indicated, the DLC saddled Gore with a crypto-neocon VP, Gore was “cool with it”, didn’t bolt-and-run as an independent instead, the election results were clearly rigged, he gave up with barely a whimper and it was outside parties (Greens, non-profits, etc.) who’ve been investigating election fraud. Gore’s running, like Kerry’s, almost reads like a great play. Something out there to keep up the image of democracy, of choice, but he wasn’t the pre-selected winner.