One of the benefits of the recent revelation that Donald Trump may not have paid taxes for 18 years is that it has allowed Hillary Clinton to make a key point: the true enemies of America’s economic progress are not overseas companies and governments, or invading hordes of immigrants. The true enemies of America’s progress are corporate raiders and modern day robber-barons who care far more about their own stock shares growing than the lives of their employees or their customers.
Trump has made it clear exactly where his loyalties are. Not with the troops; not with firefighters; not with the police; not with American workers, as he has his products made in China and Mexico; and not with his own employees who he demeans, ridicules, bullies, and spies on. He—like so many others in the tax-sheltered class—is ultimately loyal only to himself.
Hillary Clinton this week made the point that she, after a lifetime of public service, is loyal to the American people and their future. And she has a plan.
As opposed to Trump’s blame game, Clinton’s economic plan actually addresses the problems that American workers face.
- A 100-days jobs plan: Break through Washington gridlock to make the boldest investment in good-paying jobs since World War II. Hillary will fight to pass a plan in her first 100 days in office to invest in infrastructure, manufacturing, research and technology, clean energy, and small businesses. She will strengthen trade enforcement, and she’ll say no to trade deals like TPP that don’t meet a high enough bar of creating good-paying jobs. And she will make the U.S. the clean energy superpower of the world—with half a billion solar panels installed by the end of her first term and enough clean, renewable energy to power every home in America within 10 years of her taking office.
- Make debt free college available to all Americans. Hillary will make college debt-free, and she’ll provide relief for Americans with existing debt by allowing them to refinance their student loans.
- Rewrite the rules so that more companies share profits with employees—and fewer ship profits and jobs overseas. Hillary will reward companies that share profits and invest in their workers, and she will raise the minimum wage to a living wage. She will crack down on companies that shift profits overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes, and she’ll make companies that export jobs give back the tax breaks they’ve received in America. She will defend existing Wall Street reform and push for new measures to strengthen it.
- Make certain that corporations, the wealthy, and Wall Street pay their fair share.Hillary will pay for her economic priorities and avoid adding to the national debt by ensuring the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations pay their fair share. For example, she’ll fight for the Buffett Rule, close the carried interest loophole, and impose a new surcharge on multi-millionaires and billionaires.
- Enact policies that meet the challenges families face in the 21st-century economy. Hillary will make it possible for parents to succeed at work and at home by updating outdated laws so they match how families work today. She will fight for equal pay and guarantee paid leave, two changes that are long overdue. And she will provide relief from the rising costs of necessities like child care and housing, while taking steps to provide Americans with greater retirement and health care security.
In a rousing, off the cuff, non-prompter speech (which begins at 38:00 into the event), Hillary describes her vision and plan and how it is the Trumps of the world that stand in the way.
She laid out (in personal terms) how her own family is connected to the values of hard work—unlike Trump who inherited his wealth, and used scams and shady tax schemes to keep it alive when it should have collapsed years ago due to lousy mismanagement.
It’s personal for me; I’m the granddaughter of a factory worker from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He went to work in the same lace mill every day for 50 years. He believed he passed it down to my dad, who passed it down to me, that if he did what he was supposed to do, he’d have a good life and his kids would have an even better life. That is the American dream. That is what we believe in, that’s what we’ve got to keep going generation after generation.
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And because of my grandfather’s hard work, my dad made it to college. And then after serving in the Navy during World War II, he started his own small business printing fabric for draperies. As a young girl, I’d sometimes go to his print plant. It was a long building; no natural light, no windows. But he had these long tables where he’d roll out the fabric and then I’d watch him work with silk- screens.
If you’ve ever seen that — he would take the silkscreen, he’d put it down, he’d pour the paint in, he’d take the squeegee, go across all the way down to the end of one table, then over to the next table, all the way back, and then if there was a second color to be added, he would do that. He sometimes let me help with the squeegee; that was my favorite part.
(LAUGHTER) And I — I know he worked really hard. He worked really hard. He believed in hard work. He passed that on to me. He provided a good middle class life for us. So I am proud to stand with hardworking families all over Toledo, Ohio and America who should have the same chance that I did to share in the American dream, which should be big enough for everybody. [emphasis added]
The American Dream isn’t to become Donald Trump—a hyper-rich, boorish, myopic narcissist. It’s to provide a good life for your children so that they can go on and prosper beyond your dreams with a good middle-class life.
The chief impediment to this is those in power. Their only goal is to increase that power, taking it away from the rest of us by manipulating the “rules” to their favor, and by crafting the law to bless their crimes against the rest of us.
And yet, this is one of the defining debates not just of this election, but of our time. Now, I will say, most American companies — most are run by honorable patriotic people who care about their employees and communities. But there are still too many powerful interests fighting to protect their own profits and privileges at the expense of everyone else.
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And they are aided and abetted by the rules and incentives in our economy who actually encourage people at the top to take advantage of consumers, workers, small businesses and taxpayers. That makes it tougher for the well-meaning CEOs to take the high road and it gets even harder when we don’t aggressively enforce the rules.
CLINTON: When we don’t enforce trade rules that allow other countries with lower wages and standards to get an unfair leg up, when we don’t enforce rules on Wall Street, which exerts enormous pressure on publicly traded companies to prioritize boosting share prices in the short term, over building real value, investing in workers, plant and equipment over the longer term.
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And let’s be honest. The tax code rewards corporations for outsourcing jobs, and their profits overseas, instead of investing here in the United States.
And — it is riddled with loopholes that let the rich get even richer and make income inequality even worse. It tilts the playing field further against small businesses that can’t afford lawyers and lobbyists. So with all these pressures pushing in the wrong direction, it’s even more important that we have an election about these very issues.
Trump is correct when he says the “game is rigged,” but it’s been rigged for people like Trump by people like Trump. That has to change.
Now, I — I know how hard this is. But I think we are on the cusp, if we win this election, to be able to get these things done. Right?
AUDIENCE: Yeah!
CLINTON: That means pursuing reforms that unleash the enormous, positive potential of the American private sector. We’ve got unmatched talent, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, so when we work together, we can all benefit.
Now, I believe corporations that benefit from everything America has to offer should feel (ph) some sense of responsibility, not just to their biggest shareholders, but to their workers, to their customers, to their communities and, yes, to our country. (APPLAUSE)
To the United States of America.
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We have been — we have been moving off track for decades. I don’t need to tell you that. You know it. You’ve lived it. You’ve seen it. But it is time to get back on track.
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This country of ours, this system of ours, the rule of law, the opportunity to get an education and go as far as your hard work and ambition will take you, and we created the biggest engine of economic growth in the world, the American middle class.
So when the middle class thrives, the country thrives, and when it doesn’t, we don’t. Right?
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And I’m going to use the White House and every tool at my disposal as your president to make the case that patriotism is profitable. Standing up for America, investing in America, will pay off.
Now, we have always had innovators and entrepreneurs who built real companies and create real value, but we should not and we will not respect those who get rich by cheating everybody else.
Cheaters. Cheaters like Countrywide, AIG, Deutsche Bank, and Wells Fargo.
Now, to understand why this is so important, consider the recent examples we’ve seen of egregious corporate behavior. Look at Wells Fargo. Really shocking, isn’t it? One of the nation’s biggest banks bullying thousands of employees into committing fraud against unsuspecting customers. Secretly opening up millions of accounts for people without their consent, even their knowledge. Misusing personal information and then sticking customers with hidden fees.
It is outrageous that eight years after a cowboy culture on Wall Street wrecked our economy, we are still seeing powerful bankers playing fast and loose with the law.
And then in a category by himself, there’s Donald Trump.
Yes, Donald Trump.
Well, you may have heard that he has long refused to release his tax returns, the way every other nominee for president has done for decades. You can look at 40 years of my tax returns. I think we need a law that says, if you become the nominee of the major parties, you have to release your tax returns.
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Now, a lot of us were wondering, what is he hiding? It must be really terrible. Well, The New York Times has discovered at least part of the answer. Back in the 1990s, Trump apparently lost a billion dollars in a single year on bad investments and failing casinos. Now, how anybody can lose a dollar, let alone a billion dollars in the casino industry is kind of beyond me, right? It’s just hard to figure. But as a result, it doesn’t look like he paid a dime of federal income tax for almost two decades.
Now, while millions of American families, including mine and yours, were working hard paying our fair share, it seems he was contributing nothing to our nation. Imagine that. Not fair. Nothing for Pell grants to help kids go to college. Nothing for veterans. Nothing for our military. And you know, he has been dissing America in this whole campaign, right? He talks us down. He makes disparaging comments about our country. He calls our military a disaster. Well, it’s not, but it might have been if everybody else had failed to pay taxes to support our brave men and women in uniform. [emphasis added]
Trump treats people who actually pay their taxes like dummies. Chumps. Who cares about what it costs to send our soldiers to war, or what it costs to take care of them when they eventually return, wounded inside and out?
I — I saw a newspaper article, and a gentleman named Steve Crouse (ph), who owns the Glass City Cafe here in Toledo summed it up pretty well in this article. He said, I would feel guilty if I didn’t pay anything. It’s flat out cheating the government.
Now, my friend Bernie Sanders was right yesterday when he said, Trump reflects a distorted view of the American people and what this country is all about.
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Now, Trump represents the same rigged system that he claims he’s going to change. The whole story tells us everything we need to know about how Trump does business. After he made all of those bad bets and lost all that money, he didn’t lift a finger to help and protect his employees, or all the small businesses and contractors he’d hired, or the people of Atlantic City. They all got hammered.
While he was busy with his accountants trying to figure out how to keep living like a billionaire, and all the while he was using his political connections to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and extra tax breaks for his companies. In other words, Trump was taking from America with both hands, and leaving the rest of us with the bill. [emphasis added]
Leaving the rest of us with the bill. That’s what Trump is promising America, a $5.3 trillion bill while he and the upper crust skate off with billions more.
CREDIT WHERE credit is due: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has improved his proposals for fiscal policy. Whereas he previously backed $9.25 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years, with no plausible way to pay for them, last week he offered a revised version that would cost less than half that, $4.4 trillion, with no plausible way to pay for it. In other words, his prescriptions have progressed from preposterous to merely intellectually dishonest; their foreseeable impact on the U.S. economy, from destabilizing to merely dangerous.
Of the tax cuts Mr. Trump proposed, the vast majority would benefit upper-income households and corporations, the latter of which would see their top rate slashed from 35 percent to 15 percent. In truth, it’s difficult to estimate the impact of these proposed changes, because the Trump campaign left it unclear whether the 15 percent top rate would also apply to “pass-through” businesses; these firms pay taxes at individual income rates, which are higher than corporate rates and would remain so (albeit reduced) under Mr. Trump’s plan. If the lower corporate rate applies to pass-throughs as well, the revenue reduction could be even larger.
Mr. Trump says his plan would not blow up the national debt, which he has elsewhere promised to tame, because tax cuts and separate trade and regulatory changes would mostly pay for themselves through rapid growth — 3.5 percent per year, he predicts. Thus, to avoid increasing budget deficits, the government would need to trim only $800 billion in spending, over 10 years. All of those savings would have to come out of non-defense, non-veterans discretionary spending, because Mr. Trump has pledged to increase defense and veterans aid, while leaving Social Security and Medicare — the two biggest drivers of the debt — untouched. This means that Mr. Trump would impose 100 percent of the budget restraint on roughly 15 percent of the budget — the sliver that pays for national parks, law enforcement, research and diplomacy, among other vital functions. (Unclear in all of this is how Mr. Trump would come up with additional billions for an expanded Border Patrol, but we digress.)
Yes, how would he pay for his “deportation force”? Most likely: he won’t. And the bills will keep piling up.