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What is Clinton's economic program?
#1
Below just a small excerpt from terrific work from Dylan Matthews from Vox:


Quote:Hillary Clinton often gets described as an incrementalist, with a relatively modest agenda. This makes sense, given that she spent the past two years or so running against a literal democratic socialist and Donald Trump.


But this depiction misleads more than it informs. Amid her blizzard of plans and white papers, the scope and ambition of Clinton’s program often gets missed. Just imagine, for a second, what a world in which it all became law would look like.

The vast majority of families would be able to send children to public colleges and universities tuition-free. Four-year-olds would have universal access to pre-K, and child care would be massively subsidized so as to cap costs at 10 percent of a family’s income. All workers would get 12 weeks paid family leave and 12 weeks paid medical leave, in case they need to care for a new child, a sick family member, or themselves. The child tax credit would be doubled for families with young children and made available to poor families with little earnings.

Eleven million undocumented immigrants would gain a pathway to citizenshipMedicare would be expanded to people as young as 55, and allowed to negotiate down drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, and every state would have a robust public option. All states would expand Medicaid coverage to anyone living underneath the poverty line, and subsidies for health care on the exchanges would be more generous. The government would cover out-of-pocket health costs through the tax code. Federal money would be able to pay for abortions for people with government-paid insurance. Social Security benefits would increase. The minimum wage would be at least $12maybe $15 an hour, and firms could unionize through card check rather than having to go through elections.

There would be an injection of $500 billion — $275 billion of which comes from federal coffers — into rebuilding roads, highways, mass transit, airports, seaports, broadband networks, electrical grids, water pipes, and other forms of infrastructure. This would be the largest public works push from the federal government since the building of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. Much of that money would go to directly hiring workers, particularly youth in minority communities. The Clinton campaign estimates that the $500 billion would create about 6.5 million jobs, more than half of which come from public money.

And to pay for it all, the rich would face a top income tax rate of 43.6 percent and a top estate tax rate of 65 percent, each of which is the highest since Ronald Reagan. Investors would face a new tax on financial transactions.

Put together, this is not quite a plan for full social democracy, like the one Bernie Sanders cobbled together to mixed results in the primaries. But, to borrow a Silicon Valley term, it’s a plan for a minimal viable product of social democracy. It extends the promise of the American safety net from cradle to grave, covering major gaps that currently exist here and not abroad for the first time in American history.

“I think a lot of Clinton’s proposals are very much a step in the direction of a Nordic-style or social democratic welfare state,” Lane Kenworthy, a sociologist at the University of Arizona and author of Social Democratic America, says.

The result would leave the United States’ safety net far less generous than that of, say, Sweden. Hospitals aren’t nationalized. Parental leave is 12 weeks, not 480 days per couple. There isn’t a child allowance paid to all families, no strings attached.
Hillary Clinton’s quiet revolution - Vox
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