Clinton plan is bad for Colo.

While Republican presidential candidates offer innovative policy prescriptions for economic growth, improving education, reducing poverty and reforming entitlement programs so they don’t bankrupt our children, Hillary Clinton blathers on about mythical voter suppression, the need for 500 million solar panels, and the faux travesty of overpaid CEOs.

But perhaps Clinton’s worst old idea (so far) is a massive increase in the capital gains tax rate for upper-income earners, supposedly to counter “shortterm” thinking by corporations and investors.

Clinton’s robotic pandering to the envy-fueled Democratic base is odd politics, bad economics, and ignorant of history — including the history of her husband’s biggest economic success.

It should also frighten Coloradans who are seeing so much growth and prosperity due to the entrepreneurial energies of startups and expanding businesses.

Politically, Clinton’s tax-hike proposal is odd because it targets only people in roughly the top 0.75 percent of earners, individuals earning over $413,200 and couples earning over $464,850. Clinton is trying to appeal to those Democrats whose sensibilities lean more toward the class warfare of Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren while not excessively offending her wellheeled supporters on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.

But she’s accomplishing neither goal. The restless left doesn’t understand why she wouldn’t penalize the success of those earning $200,000; after all, as President Obama put it, at some point you’ve made enough money. Her moneyed supporters will eventually tire of her painting them as the arteries into which government leeches should sink their teeth. And the ordinary American spends even less time thinking about capital gains tax rates than about climate change.

Economically, her proposal is nonsensical. Bloomberg describes it as “adding complexity.”

Raising capital gains tax rates and holding periods reduces the willingness of investors to exit profitable investments and enter other ventures, including funding the sorts of start-up businesses and expansions that are providing an incredible engine of growth in Colorado. It’s called the “lock-in effect” and it is one of the most damaging aspects of capital gains taxes, with the extent of the harm being proportional to the tax rate and the holding period, both of which Clinton wants to increase.

As authors David Butler and Linda Tischler put it in their 2015 book, “Design to Grow,” “Colorado wants to be a startup state, in order to create the kind of innovation ecosystem we associate with Silicon Valley but on a much bigger scale. It seems to be working: In 2013, a study indicated that, in Colorado, a new startup launches every 72 hours.”

Clinton’s proposal is a dagger aimed at the heart of our state’s increasing prosperity.

Strangest of all, Clinton’s plan demonstrates ignorance of the success of her husband, following his agreeing (under Republican pressure) to cut the capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. Following the progrowth Bill Clinton tax cut, the stock market rallied, employment soared, and — contrary to the worries of tax “justice” warriors — tax revenue increased so dramatically that it allowed President Clinton to preside over the first federal budget surplus in a generation.

“Progressive” politicians, including the leftward-moving Hillary Clinton, offer us anything but progress. Ross Kaminsky is host of “The Ross Kaminsky Show” on Saturday mornings on 850 KOA.