Sometimes, strange as it may seem, it pays to listen to what politicians are saying.
Certainly that was the case earlier this month when Hillary Clinton, the leader in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes, outlined what she calls her “plan to rebuild the road to the middle class.”
Pay no attention to the muddled metaphor. The New York senator isn’t concerned about funding roads; she wants to drop billions in direct and indirect government funds directly on members of the middle class. At first blush, this doesn’t seem remarkable. Politicians start making promises long before elections and seldom stop until the results are in.
There are two things, however, that make Clinton’s proposal worth further attention. The first is that she is echoing one of the major 1992 campaign themes of her husband, former president Bill Clinton. It was Bill Clinton who famously declared the 1992 economy in the worst shape in 50 years, and promised not only new jobs for Americans but “high-paying jobs.”
Well, surprise, surprise. Mrs. Clinton has recently claimed that income disparity in the U.S. is now worse than it has been since the year of the stock market crash, 1929. She has also spotted a whole series of clouds, not one of which appears to have a silver lining.
The middle class, she says, can’t make ends meet. Health care and college tuition costs have skyrocketed, and families that used to rely on building equity in their homes not only can’t do that any longer, “they are losing their homes.”
At this point, it may be useful to recall that Bill Clinton, after running on a promise of tax cuts for the middle class, abandoned those promises, raised taxes instead and later said that he agreed with critics who said he raised taxes “too much.” Oh, and by the way, Clinton found that once he took office, the economy didn’t look as bad as it once did.
The second reason Mrs. Clinton’s speech deserves close attention is that much if not most of the benefits in her proposal are direct handouts to labor unions. While it is true that members of labor unions may be members of the middle class, it is also true that under the Clinton proposal they are the most-favored class of all. Unions would benefit from the so-called creation of a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund. Mrs. Clinton wants to create this fund by extracting the money from oil companies and spreading the money around in grants.
These grants would, of course, require the payment of the prevailing wage, which has become another term for the “union wage.” In addition, bridges and highways would be rebuilt on a scale never before achieved. Trade laws would be rewritten to better benefit the unions. The health care delivery system would be revised in ways that would encourage unionization and, finally, the public education system would be largely left alone, unbothered by new programs that might threaten the teacher’s union monopoly.
High on Mrs. Clinton’s list of how to rebuild the middle class is a proposal that would allow labor unions to organize the work place without the necessity of getting the approval of workers through a secret ballot.
It is not clear that there has ever been an urgent need for government programs to help what is the largest class of American citizens, the middle class.
Sadly, there is not a word in Mrs. Clinton’s proposals about what is arguably the biggest problem facing the middle class: the unavoidable fact that the Social Security program and Medicare are both careening toward bankruptcy. On those subjects, she and the rest of the Democratic presidential field remain tongue-tied.
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@ ) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His column appears twice a month.
