Hillary Clinton has sought to undercut Donald Trump’s appeal to working-class voters, claiming her Republican rival is untrustworthy on economic issues and pushes policies that would only benefit the super-wealthy – himself included.
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“Mr. Trump may talk a big game on trade, but his approach is based on fear, not strength”, Clinton said in MI. She said it’s not enough to “rant and rave” about trade deals that have hurt Americans, and that the United States cannot “cut ourselves off from the world”.
Clinton contrasted the Trump plan with her proposal to make the rich pay more and expand the role of government.
At an appearance in Miami Beach, Florida, hours before Clinton’s speech, Trump said his rival “wants to tax and regulate our economy to death”.
“Before he tweets how about he is really the one who is going to put America first in trade”, Clinton said, “let’s remember where Trump makes many of his own products, because it sure is not America”. “He’s offered no credible plans”, she said, taking aim at the tax plan Trump unveiled earlier this week – specifically a detail of his plan she labeled as the “Trump loophole” that would cut taxes for wealthy people like her Republican opponent. With few exceptions, Trump has provided more of a philosophical basis for an economic plan than specifics, although he did call for greater child care deductions for families.
“Based on what we know from the Trump campaign, he wants America to work for him and his friends, at the expense of everyone else”, she said, at a manufacturing company.
“If Team USA was as fearful as Trump, Michael Phelps and Simone Biles would be cowering in the locker room, afraid to come out and compete”, the Democratic nominee said.
While her blueprint is heartening advocates for workers and the poor, business groups are rankled that it doesn’t include more tax and regulatory relief that they say would spur job creation.
Unfortunately, neither candidate addressed affordable housing, a major need in our region. Clinton also set a goal of connecting every household in the country to broadband internet service by 2020, in what would be the end of her four-year term.
She admitted that trade deals were too often sold to the American people “with rosy scenarios that didn’t pan out”.
She also said she would oppose any trade deals that would send American jobs overseas, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“I think we’ve got to reverse what has become a kind of commonplace view, which is everybody needs to go to college”, she said.
And on Thursday in Michigan, Clinton reiterated her commitment to that agenda in her scathing critique of Donald Trump’s economic plans. But he said it’s harder to state definitively whether that would be lower than middle-class families’ rates, since it would depends on their income level, and thus tax rate, as well as the amount they pay in payroll taxes.
Instead of making her typical promise to “build on President Obama’s legacy”, she ran through a list of possible new federal spending programs she believes would spur economic growth. In fact, statistics showed the region lost 31,000 payroll jobs during her tenure.
“She’s playing that to her advantage of delivering a strategy that is familiar and frankly has largely worked in many ways if you give the president credit for improvement in the last eight years”, said Christopher Smart, a former Treasury official in the Obama administration.
Clinton’s speech was not a new policy roll out, but was more meant to be a direct rebuttal to the mix of tax breaks and a simplification of the tax code that Trump outlined in an economic address on Monday in Detroit.
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Both candidates chose tightly contested MI – specifically, the Detroit area – to make their updated economic pitches. And the same is true when he talks about our country.
