Comrade Hillary's Economic Plan

Lovely article. If your a libertarian or just a free marketer, this one will make you nervous.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration.

Nice way to start. Nothing helps free markets like government intervention.

Reflecting what her aides said were very different conditions today, Mrs. Clinton put her emphasis on issues like inequality and the role of institutions like government, rather than market forces, in addressing them.

She said that economic excesses — including executive-pay packages she characterized as often “offensive” and “wrong” and a tax code that had become “so far out of whack” in favoring the wealthy — were holding down middle-class living standards.

Favoring the wealthy is always a hoot to read. I wonder who pays the vast majority of taxes in this country. It certainly isn't the poor, or the middle class. By favoring the wealthy she must be referring to favoring their money for more appropriate uses.

Mrs. Clinton’s approach to the economy would have three main components. She would roll back the Bush tax cuts for households with incomes over $250,000 while creating more tax breaks below that threshold; impose closer scrutiny on financial markets, including the investments being made by foreign governments in the United States; and raise spending on job-creating projects like the development of alternative energy.

“We’ve done it in previous generations,” she said, alluding to large-scale public projects like the interstate highway system and the space program. “But we’ve got to have a plan.”

Funny how she says conditions are so very different and yet alludes to projects from the past as a means of fixing the problems. Seeing that development of alternative energy is something that you're not going to find occurring in the low income business sector, I don't see that what she's as being anything but gibberish. Can anyone see that as being a large job creator? Well, maybe she's envisioning huge gerbil wheels with people running on them to create electricity.

Mrs. Clinton’s approach involves programs narrowly focused to deal with specific problems, a strategy that economists say has pluses and minuses. Her proposal for short-term economic stimulus, centered more on home-heating and mortgage subsidies than a broad tax rebate, has generally received lower marks from economists than Mr. Obama’s plan, which emphasizes immediate tax rebates to most workers.

Hillary shows her colors clearly there. Essentially she only wants to allow you certain very focused areas where you can spend the money that she wants to redistribute. She must be in the oil companies pocket, because she wants the money to go to them for the home-heating subsidies. This is more a subsidy for mega-corps than an economic stimulus package. With this ultra-control level on a topic, it frightens me to think where she will go on so many other topics.