Hillary Clinton is pinning her economic case for the winning the presidency to boosting middle-class wages on Monday as she begins to unveil her economic agenda.
The Democratic frontrunner is leaning on the job creation records of her husband, Bill Clinton, and her boss during her time as secretary of state, Barack Obama, in a Monday morning speech where she laid out her economic vision and also took swipes at her Republican counterparts.
She name-checked Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker by name, and referenced former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s critcized comments about Americans needing to work “longer hours.” While Bush clarified almost immediately that he was referencing part-time workers who wanted to be full time, Clinton repeated her response Monday that Bush hadn’t met many hard working Americans.
“They don’t need a lecture,” Clinton said. “They need a raise.”
But Clinton is also presenting what she sees as the central challenge for the next president: Focusing not just on major economic indicators like the 4% growth rate that Bush has said he could achieve, but instead whether working Americans’ paychecks are growing.
Among the top proposals Clinton will advance is offering companies new tax incentives to share profits with their employees. She’ll pitch that proposal as a way for workers and businesses to “grow together,” spreading the gains of increased productivity.
“Hard-working Americans deserve to benefit from the record corporate earnings they helped produce,” Clinton said, adding, “That will be good for workers and good for business,” she will say. “Studies show profit-sharing that gives everyone a stake in a company’s success can boost productivity and put money directly into employees’ pockets. It’s a win-win.”
The speech — at The New School, a university in New York City — comes as Clinton attempts to stave off a growing challenge on her left from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described Democratic socialist presidential contender who has made higher taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans a key plank of his campaign.
Clinton countered what she sees as a conservative-driven narrative in American politics that intervening in the economy on behalf of the middle class stymies job growth.
“That’s really not what the weight of economic evidence shows,” said Heather Boushey, who has consulted with Clinton’s campaign and is the executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “You can’t accept a trade-off anymore that doesn’t seem to hold water.”
“I think that she is going to be laying out an agenda that looks at what inequality means for families up and down the income distribution, what we can do to fix it, and it’s really exciting to see a politician take up a very serious set of research ideas and bring them into the public debate,” Boushey said.
Clinton attacked the “sharing economy” — represented by companies like the ride-sharing app Uber — which create jobs but don’t offer benefits and protections.
And she lambasted what her campaign sees as quarterly capitalism — a focus on short-term profits without a view for the long-term health of companies and their workers.
She’ll pitch an American infrastructure bank, as well as a renewed focus on clean energy and tax relief for small businesses, the aides said. And she’ll preview her upcoming policy pitches on child care, paid sick leave and paid family leave, all issues Sanders has been pushing on the stump.
She’ll also discuss a more direct shift in wealth, including increasing the minimum wage and tax reforms that would result in the wealthy paying more.
Instead of engaging directly with Sanders, Clinton is instead going after Republican contenders like Bush, who she’s asserting would do little to close the gap between top earners’ incomes and those of the middle class.
Those Republicans attacked Clinton ahead of Monday’s speech.
“The truth is, Hillary Clinton’s ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism,” Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard executive who’s now a GOP presidential contender, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
“When you have a 70,000 page tax code, you’ve got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well-connected to dig your way through that tax code,” Fiorina said. “What I will continue to point out is the fact that every policy she is pursuing will make income inequality worse, not better, crony capitalism even worse, not better.”
It’s the first major policy speech of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Instead of delving deeply into one area, her aides said she’ll use the speech as a launching point for specific policies to address college affordability, wage growth, corporate accountability and paid leave. She’ll then delve into each of those in separate events, the aides said.
The policies the result of conversations between Clinton’s policy team and more than 200 outside domestic policy advisers over several months — with Clinton herself meeting with what the campaign described as dozens of economists and experts.
Her policy team is headed by Jake Sullivan, a former top aide to Clinton at the State Department and U.S. negotiator in the Iran nuclear talks, as well as Ann O’Leary and Maya Harris, who both worked at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
Outside advisers have included a host of liberal economists, former government officials and more. Among them are the Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, top Obama economic policy aides Gene Sperling, Christina Romer, David Kamin and Alan Krueger.
Neera Tanden, a top 2008 Clinton campaign aide and now president of the Center for American Progress, was among the outside advisers, as were former Bill Clinton economist Alan Blinder, and economists Jacob Hacker, Ronnie Chatterji and Boushey.
