Clinton slams Trump on economy
WARREN, Mich. — In a full-throttled rejection of Donald Trump’s economic policies, Hillary Clinton on Thursday accused him of feigning a connection to the working man while advocating policies that would “work for him and his friends, at the expense of everyone else.”
Seeking to chip away at the perception among working-class white voters that Trump is the economic populist in the race, Clinton said the Republican nominee merely paid “lip service” to being on the side of average Americans. She contrasted his personal wealth with her middle-class upbringing.
“There is a myth out there that he’ll stick it to the rich and powerful because, somehow, at heart, he’s really on the side of the little guy,” Clinton said. “Don’t believe it.”
Clinton referred to the
tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations that Trump presented in a speech in Detroit on Monday, saying he “wants to give trillions in tax breaks to people like himself,” which would lead to broad cuts in spending on education, health care and environmental protection.
Although she has attacked Trump’s business record for months, her address presented the first opportunity for Clinton to deliver a detailed point-by-point rebuttal to the economic proposals Trump unveiled this week.
The nearly back-to-back addresses on the economy put into sharp relief the candidates’ contrasting positions on an issue that has preoccupied voters throughout the lengthy presidential contest, with Trump seizing on economic dislocation in mixing populist anti-trade positions with traditionally Republican tax cutting, and Clinton seeing a strong government hand in creating jobs and driving up wages.
Clinton called for making the biggest infrastructure investment — $275 billion — since World War II, and urged aggressive spending on green energy to counter China and Germany. And she repeated her plans to make public colleges and universities tuition free for instate middle-class families.
‘Trump loophole’
She criticized key elements of Trump’s tax-cut plans, particularly the elimination of the estate tax and his plan to cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent; she said his plan for business owners included what she called the “Trump loophole,” which would “allow him to pay less than half the current tax rate on income from many of his own companies.”
She characterized her opponent’s economic doctrine as a “more extreme version of the failed theory of trickle-down economics” mixed with his own “outlandish Trumpian ideas that even Republicans reject.”
And she rejected Trump’s promises to ease financial regulation and do away with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which he calls detrimental to average Americans.
“Even conservative experts say Trump’s agenda will pull our economy back into recession,” and cause the loss of 3.4 million jobs, Clinton said, pointing to an analysis for Moody’s Analytics led by Mark Zandi, who advised Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.
The issue of trade hurt Clinton in the primary in Michigan, which is heavily reliant on manufacturing jobs. She lost the state to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who, like Trump, sharply criticized Clinton for her previous support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which her husband signed into law, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she supported as secretary of state.
Before Clinton’s speech, Trump used an address to the National Association of Home Builders in Miami Beach to assail former President Bill Clinton for signing NAFTA into law, which Trump said devastated upstate New York, and he hammered Clinton for failing to deliver on a promise she made in her 2000 Senate campaign to bring 200,000 jobs to the state.
“She passed no legislation that helped,” Trump said. “She couldn’t get out of her own way.”
‘He’s missing so much’
Clinton gave her address after touring the Futuramic Tool & Engineering factory in Warren, which made automotive parts in the past but has diversified to supply parts to the aerospace industry. Praising the company for being at the front line of a potential “manufacturing renaissance,” Clinton criticized Trump for taking a dark view of America’s potential.
“When Donald Trump visited Detroit on Monday, he talked only of failure, poverty and crime,” she said. “He’s missing so much.”
Clinton has spent over a year explaining her main economic proposals and proposed nothing new Thursday.
But she did contrast her specific promises with those Trump offered Monday.
She mocked Trump’s plan to give tax breaks for child care — the brainchild of his daughter Ivanka and intended to appeal to middleclass mothers — as a boon to rich families with nannies.
And, in contrast to Trump’s corporate tax reductions, she said she would impose an “exit tax” to penalize companies that move jobs overseas and offer tax incentives to companies that share profits with employees.