Reading through Will's rambling Op-Ed, one finds that there are no arguments put forward that are based on official government data, informed by an college-level understanding of the principles of micro- and macroeconomics that the Democratic presidential candidates as of the fall of 2007 are putting forward disingenuous, cynical and inefficient policy platforms with regard to dealing with the nation's serious crisis of a dramatically fraying social "safety net" due to the shift that has occurred in this country in responsibility for aiding the working poor and middle class Americans who suffer a sudden financial catastrophe: medical illness, job loss and unexpected long-term unemployment from the Congressional Representatives who have been elected by the American people to multi-national corporate employers (read Hacker's book on middle-class economic insecurity and risk titled The Great Risk Shift. The same corporations busy off shoring their labor force to Third World nations where employees can be paid pennies an hour with no labor or human rights protections.
Take just one of Will's arguments:
[Hillary] Clinton's idea for helping Americans save for retirement is this: Any family that earns less than $60,000 and that puts $1,000 into a new 401(k)-type plan would receive a matching $1,000 tax cut. For those earning between $60,000 and $100,000 the government would match half of the first $1,000. She proposes to pay for this by taxing people who will be stoical about this -- dead people -- by freezing the estate tax exemption at its 2009 level.
So what's wrong with Hillary's policy? First of all, why should the government use he tax revenue it receives from all Americans and then create a special exemption on the tax dollars collected from multimillionaire estates to their children as opposed to helping families with three children and a husband suddenly out of work for a few months at the same time that the wife needs to pay for her cancer care out of pocket due to lack of health insurance.
A conservative case can be made for something like Clinton's proposal. It is a case for reducing the supply of government by reducing demand for it, and doing so by giving people ownership of enlarged private assets as a basis for their security. It is a case for raising the nation's deplorable saving rate and simultaneously encouraging the nation's economic literacy and temperance by giving more people a stake in equities markets.
Will is not surprisingly quite silent on the question of how this mysterious "we" can help make the bankrupt middle class worker "raise his savings rate" as though his income were perfectly elastic. Also, "giving more people a stake in the equities markets" does not in itself ensure that the typical working middle class family will gain an increase in their net worth of savings rate. The broad domestic stock markets (e.g. NYSE, NASDAQ) are good for long-term investing; one could make, say, a 10-20% return over a decade investing in Blue Chip companies. And as an asset class, it probably beats any competitor as a long-term investment strategy.
But the problem is that individuals (and their families dependent on his or her savings) enter, exit and permanently withdraw from the labor market at times that are often inopportune as far as their equity investment valuations might be concerned. As a simple thought experiment, imagine someone with a large share of their Social Security investments tied up in the NASDAQ stocks in the middle of 2001 who is forced into early retirement at the age of 60 for medical reasons. (And by the way, as recently as six months ago, many of the shares in their portfolio were considered safe, "growth" stocks, unlike junk bonds were in the 1980s.) This experiment can be replicated by imagining someone whose retirement was invested in what seemed like rock solid investments in early 2001 - perhaps WorldCom or Enron stock?
Will then goes on to attempt a further journalistic sleight-of-hand:
George W. Bush made this case in his advocacy of personal accounts financed by a portion of individuals' Social Security taxes and invested in funds based on equities and bonds. When he proposed this, Clinton stridently opposed him, and not just because she thought it would undermine Social Security's solvency and political support. She also said it was a dangerous gamble that would make retirement insecure by linking retirement savings to the stock market. Echoing a trope from Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, she said investing retirement funds in the stock market was a "risky scheme."
Today her Web site calls her proposal a way to save for "a secure retirement." After an undisclosed epiphany, she belatedly recognizes that 401(k) funds invested in equities are a foundation for security.
The important point here is that Clinton's health care plan differs substantively from the GOP fallback on financing tax cuts for the super-rich by cutting back on federal government programs, services and financial support for the poor who have no social safety net of which to speak. He is embarrassingly cynical in this sentence, hoping perhaps that none of his reading audience will bother to compare Clinton's policies with George W. Bush's.
For example, Clinton has made public a policy agenda for reforming healthcare, strengthening the middle class and helping support parents as they raise their families, all of which are radical departures from the Bush Administration's tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% and proposal to partially privatize Social Security and other entitlement programs.* To get a better sense of the Bush Administration's and allied Republican lawmakers' actual budget priorities, start off by reviewing this recent report from Reuters, for instance.
*Obviously, given the Clintons' track record of making populist-sounding campaign promises aimed at securing support from progressive Democratic voters prior to primary elections, and then triangulating in order to appease the demands of the Wall Street bankers who bankrolled their campaign, it very much remains to be seen as to whether if elected Hillary would make good on her current platform.
**If you are interested, for parts I and II of my blog's running series on George Will's utter detachment from reality, see this previous post here.
(By the way, I fully realize that an apt subtitle for this post might very well be "Signs of Life", as I haven't been, um, blogging for the past few months. I have a ton of half-finished drafts of posts that need additional research, so hopefully a lot of "new" material will pop up on Troubled Times in the next few weeks.)
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