Economic Framework Speech Preview Clips 7.11.15

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*Economic Framework Speech Preview Clips* *July 11, 2015* *HRC NATIONAL COVERAGE......................................................................................................... 1* Clinton to make boosting wages central to her economic plan // AP // Ken Thomas – July 11, 2015 1 Clinton to center campaign on raising middle-class incomes // WaPo // Philip Rucker and Jim Tankersley – July 11, 2015.......................................................................................................................... 3 Hillary Clinton to Outline Economic Policy on Monday // NYT // Amy Chozick – July 11, 2015... 6 Seven big things to know about Hillary Clinton’s new plan for the economy // WaPo // Max Ehrenfreund – July 11, 2015.......................................................................................................................... 7 Clinton to Spell Out Her Economic Plan // WSJ // Laura Meckler – July 11, 2015....................... 9 Hillary Clinton Will Set Out a Progressive Economic Vision and Focus on Income // TIME // Sam Frizell – July 11, 2015................................................................................................................................ 11 ‘Hillarynomics’: A sneak preview // Politico // Michael Grunwald – July 11, 2015..................... 13 Hillarynomics: Boosting Middle Class, Disciplining Wall Street // Bloomberg // Jennifer Epstein – July 11, 2015..................................................................................................................................... 16 UPDATE 2-US firms' thirst for quick profits hurts workers, Clinton will say // Reuters //Jonathan Allen – July 11, 2015................................................................................................................................ 20 Clinton’s Big Economic Speech Will Go Heavy on Middle Class Wages // HuffPo // Sam Stein – July 11, 2015............................................................................................................................................ 22 Clinton will unveil aggressive economic agenda that targets Wall Street, high earners // LA Times // Evan Halper – July 11, 2015........................................................................................................... 24 Hillary Clinton laces up her partisan boxing gloves for economic speech // Vox // Jonathan Allen – July 11, 2015..................................................................................................................................... 26 *HRC** NATIONAL COVERAGE* *Clinton to make boosting wages central to her economic plan <http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f84b2f3110e3477dafe9fc0a7faa19b0/clinton-make-boosting-wages-central-her-economic-plan> // AP // Ken Thomas – July 11, 2015 * Hillary Rodham Clinton will make boosting middle class incomes and wages the focus of her economic agenda, pointing to stagnant paychecks as the central challenge facing the U.S. economy. The Democratic presidential candidate intends to lay out the themes of her economic plan in a speech on Monday, emphasizing the need for the real income of everyday Americans to rise steadily alongside corporate profits and executive compensation. While Republican candidate Jeb Bush has called for an annual growth rate of 4 percent, Clinton will assert that the nation's economy should not be judged by a specific growth figure but rather by how much income increases for middle-class households. "For a typical working American, their income has not been rising anywhere near as fast as it should be rising, and that is the challenge we face," said David Kamin, a New York University law professor who has advised Clinton's campaign. "It's not a new problem, and it's going to take a holistic vision." Clinton's campaign on Saturday provided a preview of her speech to be given at The New School, a university in New York City. The campaign said the Democratic front-runner will point to economic progress during her husband's two terms in the 1990s and more recently under President Barack Obama. But she will aim to identify ways of improving upon the uneven nature of the nation's recovery since the Great Recession, bolstering wages even as the unemployment rate has fallen to a seven-year low of 5.3 percent. The former secretary of state is expected to begin outlining a series of specific economic proposals this summer on issues like wage growth, college affordability, corporate accountability and paid leave. "It's a new moment, and she's bringing new ideas to the table of how to do that," said Neera Tanden, a former Clinton policy adviser who leads the Center for American Progress. In Clinton's approach to the economy, more Americans would share in the prosperity and avoid the boom-and-bust cycles of Wall Street that have led to economic turbulence of the past decade. She is also expected to argue that the nation should not be fatalistic about globalization and that specific policy steps can help U.S. workers achieve better living standards. Clinton, who is seeking to become the nation's first female president, is also expected to address ways of making it easier for women to join the workforce. In framing an economic vision, Clinton will attempt to meet the demands of liberals within her own party who are wary of her willingness to regulate Wall Street while inspiring confidence among a larger electorate who will judge her policies if she wins the Democratic nomination. Progressives encouraged Elizabeth Warren to seek the presidency, but the Massachusetts senator, who has railed against Wall Street and corporate excesses, declined to run. Many of those same liberals are now packing large gatherings held by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is challenging Clinton for the nomination and has made economic inequality the chief plank of his campaign. Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economist and former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, said the former first lady has expressed interest in policies to curb excessive risk on Wall Street, such as a financial transactions tax on high-frequency trading, taxes on large Wall Street banks based on their risk profile and eliminating the so-called carried interest loophole that allows managers of hedge funds and private equity firms to pay a lower tax rate than most individuals. "I'm pretty sure that as the details come out you and others will judge them to be more anti-Wall Street than pro-Wall Street," Blinder said. "This is not going to look like an agenda that came out of a bunch of Wall Streeters." Clinton has said she will take nothing for granted in the primary contest, but the economic message will allow her to begin contrasting herself with Republicans. In recent speeches, she has portrayed the Republican presidential field, including Bush, the former Florida governor, as supportive of "top-down" economic policies and large tax breaks for the wealthy. "They're back to the trickle down, cut taxes on the wealthy and everything will be fine," Clinton said last week in Iowa. "This will be the biggest economic debate, because they know the only way they can win the White House back is to somehow convince voters that what we have done didn't work." *Clinton to center campaign on raising middle-class incomes <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-to-center-campaign-on-raising-middle-class-incomes/2015/07/11/17c94dca-278a-11e5-b72c-2b7d516e1e0e_story.html> // WaPo // Philip Rucker and Jim Tankersley – July 11, 2015 * Centering her presidential campaign on boosting incomes for middle-class Americans, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will begin unveiling an economic policy agenda designed to lift working families that have experienced years of wage stagnation and economic anxiety. In a major address in New York, the Democratic front-runner will lay out a diagnosis for why wages have been stuck and a framework to ensure that economic growth benefits more ordinary workers, according to campaign officials. “She believes that making sure the real incomes of everyday Americans are rising steadily and strongly is the defining economic challenge of our time,” said one campaign official, who previewed Clinton’s remarks only on the condition of anonymity. Clinton will endorse a host of popular Democratic policies such as raising the minimum wage and investing more in infrastructure. She will emphasize proposals tailored toward working women, one of her most important bases of support, such as expanding access to child care and providing workers with paid family and sick leave. Hillary Rodham Clinton, pictured here campaigning in Iowa last week, will introduce a menu of economic policies tailored toward working women. (Jim Young/Reuters) The ideas, in many ways, sound similar to the second-term agenda of President Obama, who faced an economic crisis in his first term and in his second started to more directly to address the nation’s long-running economic problems. But he has struggled to pass major legislation with a Republican-dominated Congress. Clinton will say she wants to build on his agenda, and, in working to craft an economic vision of her own, she goes further in her emphasis on giving women more flexibility to enter the workforce and on new government efforts to change the investment and pay decisions of corporations. Clinton’s speech, to be delivered at 10 a.m. Monday at the New School, a progressive university in Greenwich Village, will cement a leftward shift in the Democratic Party. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, concerns about the widening gap between rich and poor have risen to the top of the party’s agenda. Clinton is carving out space between the Republican candidates, who pay more attention to growing the economy than to raising wages, and her leading Democratic primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who focuses more on redistributing income to solve the inequality problem than on growth. Clinton’s aides said she plans to assert that the Republican candidates use rhetoric designed to appeal to middle-class voters but are proposing dated, trickle-down policies from the Reagan presidency — such as tax cuts for the wealthy, with the hope that they fuel growth that eventually benefits working families. The U.S. economy grew only 2.4 percent last year, and over the past 15 years, economic growth has slipped well below the averages of the 1980s and 1990s. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is promising to grow the economy by 4 percent a year. But Clinton will argue that “the measure of our economic success should be how much incomes rise for middle-class households, not an arbitrary growth figure,” according to the Clinton campaign official. Clinton’s speech is sure to draw fire from Republicans, who will chafe at her calls for higher taxes on the wealthy and more regulation of Wall Street and business in general. Many conservative economists warn that such proposals stunt economic growth. In her speech, aides said Clinton will argue that tectonic forces in the global economy are conspiring against middle-class families — such as automation and technology, which are eliminating middle-skill jobs that once provided solid incomes, as well as the new “sharing economy,” epitomized by Uber, which has created efficiency but also jobs lacking benefits and protections. But she will say that the government should enact policies to shape how these forces affect Americans. “She’s really addressing the issues of the moment,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, who has been advising Clinton on policy. “The challenges we face today are different than when she was running eight years ago. . . . She sees that the challenges are large and profound, but she thinks they’re issues we can address and that we shouldn’t just be subject to these global trends.” Clinton will at least implicitly critique Obama, whom she served as secretary of state, with her discussion about stagnant wages under his watch. But aides said she intends to commend him for facing and passing an urgent test to grow the economy quickly. Advisers said Clinton’s economic agenda will be organized in three parts. The first is about breaking down barriers to joining the workforce, including increased private and public investments in an infrastructure bank, tax relief to small businesses and clean energy development. As part of her workforce focus, Clinton will decry that women’s participation in the workforce has stalled after decades of growth and that many working parents, especially single mothers, have passed up job opportunities because of their family obligations. She will preview policies on child care, paid leave and paid sick days. Clinton’s second area of focus is reducing income inequality. She will assert that the current economy unfairly rewards some work, such as financial trading, more than other work, such as building and selling products. She will celebrate Obama’s new rules on overtime, but also urge raising the minimum wage, fighting wage theft and overhauling the tax code to make the wealthiest Americans pay what she considers their fair share, as well as supporting collective bargaining and reducing health-care costs. The third area is corporate reform. She plans to argue that companies should focus more on creating lasting value, including investing in their workers, than on earning quarterly profits to satisfy shareholders. To that end, she will call for more investments in research and development, changes in tax structure and new rules on shareholder activism. Clinton will introduce these ideas in Monday’s speech and then roll out more detailed prescriptions on issues such as college affordability, paid leave, wage growth and corporate accountability throughout the summer. Liberal groups, which have been skeptical of Clinton’s candidacy and especially its closeness to Wall Street, will be watching her speech with a skeptical eye. Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group allied with liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), has not seen Clinton’s agenda but said he will be listening to hear whether Clinton takes on “the power of Wall Street and corporate bad actors.” “Do her proposals go big and represent game-changers in the lives of millions of people?” Green asked. “Or do they go small and tweak around the edges?” Jared Bernstein, a liberal economist who has advised Obama and Vice President Biden and was briefed on Clinton’s plans, said he thought she would satisfy progressives because her agenda “reconnects growth and middle-class prosperity.” For the past several months, Clinton and her advisers have met with more than 200 domestic policy experts. Campaign aides Jake Sullivan, Ann O’Leary and Maya Harris, with input from Gary Gensler, a Warren ally and the campaign’s chief financial officer, developed the policy. A number of outside advisers were involved as well, including Nobel Prize-winning liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz; former Obama White House economic advisers Gene Sperling, Alan Krueger, Christina Romer and Ronnie Chatterji; economists Alan Blinder and Heather Boushey; political scientist Jacob Hacker; law professor David Kamin; and Tanden. *Hillary Clinton to Outline Economic Policy on Monday <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/us/politics/hillary-clinton-to-outline-economic-policy-on-monday.html?_r=1> // NYT // Amy Chozick – July 11, 2015 * In a speech intended to outline the economic vision she will present throughout her presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will call for an aggressive rethinking of domestic policy with the single purpose of lifting middle-class incomes that have stagnated for years despite the growth of the economy. Mrs. Clinton will present a stark assessment of a middle class whose weekly earnings have virtually stalled for 15 years, and she will criticize “trickle down” Republican policies as having contributed to a vast concentration of wealth among the richest Americans, according to campaign aides. They offered a preview of the speech, to be delivered at the New School in New York, on the condition of anonymity. Hillary Clinton, in Roosevelt Island Speech, Pledges to Close Income GapJUNE 13, 2015 The emphasis on what economists have called “the great wage slowdown” of the 21st century is the result of Mrs. Clinton’s months of conversations with more than 200 domestic policy experts and dozens of economists. She believes that increasing the wages of average Americans to reduce income inequality is the “defining economic challenge of our time,” a campaign aide said. To that end, Mrs. Clinton will present proposals that include paid family medical leave, an increase in the federal minimum wage and incentives for corporations to increase profit-sharing programs. She will also praise President Obama’s proposals to make more workers eligible for overtime pay. Mrs. Clinton will highlight the economic record of the administration of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, when median family income, adjusted for inflation, increased to $56,080 in 1999 from $48,884 in 1993, according to census data. But she will also lay out a vision in contrast to Mr. Clinton’s message of self-reliance and his assertion that the era of big government was over. Mrs. Clinton will propose more investment in infrastructure, tax relief for small businesses, better access to child care, assistance to make college more affordable, stronger support for collective bargaining and tax increases on the wealthiest Americans. The economic team that advised Mrs. Clinton included the campaign policy advisers Jake Sullivan, Ann O’Leary and Maya Harris; Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and the policy director of Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign; and the former White House advisers Gene Sperling and Alan S. Blinder. The liberal economists Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics who has written extensively about inequality, and Alan B. Krueger, a co-author of “Inequality in America” and a professor at Princeton, also influenced Mrs. Clinton. The campaign aides said Mrs. Clinton planned to use her address on Monday to present her overall assessment of the economy. She will delve more deeply into specifics, including her plans to change the tax code, regulate Wall Street and curb corporations’ emphasis on short-term profits rather than long-term investment in employees, in a series of future speeches, they said. It remains to be seen whether Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on wage growth to alleviate income inequality will be enough to appease a growing sense of anger over economic disparity. In a Gallup poll released in January, 67 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way income and wealth were distributed in the United States. Two of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, are trying to appeal to liberals concerned that Mrs. Clinton will not go far enough in addressing inequality and that her $200,000 paid speeches to Wall Street have made her overly cozy with the top 1 percent. “Is she willing to challenge the power of Wall Street and corporate bad actors whose actions threaten the economic well-being of millions of families?” asked Adam Green, president of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. *Seven big things to know about Hillary Clinton’s new plan for the economy <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/11/embargo-seven-reasons-why-hillary-clinton-believes-inequality-is-a-choice/> // WaPo // Max Ehrenfreund – July 11, 2015 * Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of state, will deliver a major speech on economic policy on Monday, laying out in more detail her diagnosis of went wrong with the economy and, in broad strokes, how she will approach fixing it, the campaign says. She will make clear, according to a campaign official, that she doesn't believe wage stagnation and growing inequality are simply facts that we have to live with, caused by trends outside our control. Rather, she will say that the U.S. has the power to change these patterns if we make the right policy choices. Here are seven ways to understand why Clinton is making the case. (1) Clinton's top goal is raising median incomes According to a campaign official, Clinton will make clear she believes that raising incomes for average Americans is the top priority. To understand why that's become a big issue for politicians of all stripes, one doesn't need to look farther than this chart of real median income over the past 40 years. Wages have been going through a prolonged period of stagnation and decline. A related phenomenon to stagnating wages has been growing inequality. The two trends are not the same--in the 1990s, the gap between the rich and poor widened even as average workers saw pay rise. (2) She believes policy can help raise worker pay and reduce inequality The two biggest reasons usually cited for wage stagnation and growing inequality are technology, which makes lower-skill work (like working on a factory floor or clerical duties) less valuable, and globalization, which can boost corporate bottom lines but provide less opportunity for many American workers. No doubt, these are powerful factors. But another way to look at wage stagnation and inequality is through the prism of the financial return to work itself -- as opposed to the return on investments like stocks and bonds. And it has been declining. So shareholders and top executives, compensated in stock, may be more likely to enjoy the fruits of economic activity than average workers. Left-leaning economists like to point out, however, that this phenomenon largely reflects not just global patterns but also national choices, such as wage and labor standards and tax policies -- a view Clinton will endorse. (3) In particular, she is looking to boost women's pay Clinton is going to talk about how we need to do better to help women and families in the economy. Many women take time away from the workplace to raise their children, or they stop working entirely. As a result, they lose opportunities to develop their skills and professional connections. That could be one reason that while younger men and women earn similar amounts, women in middle age and older earn substantially less. (4) And Clinton is looking to make sure more women are in the workforce Clinton will call for paid leave policies to help women work while raising families. That might help raising the number of women in the labor force, which has flatlined after years of growth. How much such a policy will to close pay disparities between men and women isn't as clear. Countries with more generous parental leave polices tend to have even larger pay gaps. (5) Clinton believes the federal minimum wage should be lifted Clinton will call for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour. The chart below shows how the the minimum has changed over time, taking into account increases in prices. It's important to note that many states have already raised the minimum wage over the past few years, without federal action. A White House report showed the declining value of the minimum wage after adjusting for inflation. (6) And she believes tax policy changes that favor the wealthy are misguided Clinton is expected to chide Republican presidential candidates for continuing to espouse a GOP philosophy of tax cuts that benefit the wealthy under the theory that that will trickle down to the middle class. Effective tax rates have fallen across all income groups since the 1990s, but especially for the wealthiest Americans. Tax hikes at the end of 2013 and as part of the Affordable Care Act pushed rates back up, though not nearly close to their historic highs. (7) She also wants to make corporations, particularly on Wall Street, more focused on long-term returns The former New York senator is expected to say that our economy is too often driven by hope of a quick profit rather than more enduring and sustainable growth at benefits more people -- and she'll say this is especially a problem on Wall Street. She'll also underscore the need for more investment in things like infrastructure and research and development. As this chart from Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein of Harvard Business School shows, Wall Street and other financial components of the economy have dramatically grown as a percentage of total economic output. This partly reflects how the stock market has changed. It was once a place where companies regularly went when they wanted to take on some project in order to get new money from banks and investors. Now, it's become a place where firms distribute their earnings to their owners, instead of taking money in, as the economist J.W. Mason has shown. *Clinton to Spell Out Her Economic Plan <http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-to-spell-out-her-economic-plan-1436634052> // WSJ // Laura Meckler – July 11, 2015 * Hillary Clinton will start outlining her 2016 economic plans in a speech Monday where she will say that raising incomes for all Americans has become “the defining economic challenge of our time,” aides said. In an effort to frame the campaign debate, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination will argue that Republicans want to boost economic growth without regard to whether the middle class thrives. “She firmly believes that yes, we have to grow, but we have to grow together,” said a campaign official who previewed the speech. To promote growth, Mrs. Clinton will urge tax cuts for small businesses, new government spending on infrastructure and promoting clean energy, the aide said. She also will propose ways to make it easier for women to succeed in the workplace, including support for child care and paid leave. To address income inequality, Mrs. Clinton will call for raising the minimum wage, increasing taxes on the wealthy, boosting the power of unions and reducing health-care costs. The campaign crafted the plan in the midst of a surge of support among rank-and-file Democrats for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose presidential candidacy includes unabashed calls for government spending to redistribute income and create more fairness. The Clinton package is designed to be liberal enough to satisfy hunger on the left for a warrior for the middle class, while also promoting policies that could produce broader economic growth. Boosting domestic output in ways that increase middle-class incomes alongside rising corporate profits and executive compensation is “the key,” the campaign official said. The speech in New York City will be followed by a series of specific policy rollouts during the summer and fall. Her message will be amplified by speeches and commentary from supporters later in the week. Mrs. Clinton’s critique of Republicans is aimed in large part at former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a leading GOP presidential contender, who said in his announcement speech that his economic goal is 4% growth. He didn’t offer specifics as to how he will achieve that beyond mentioning a reduction in regulations and tax overhaul. Mr. Bush argued that wages will grow for all, not just the rich, with an expanding economy. He described “growth that lifts up the middle class—all the families who haven’t gotten a raise in 15 years. Growth that makes a difference for everyone.” Glenn Hubbard, an economic adviser to former President George W. Bush who is now advising Jeb Bush, said in an interview that, like Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Bush doesn’t support growth without wage improvements. “It’s about inclusive economic growth,” he said. “To my mind, you can’t fix the problem of a troubling pattern of wage stagnation unless and until you can have a steady state of economic growth in the country.” Mrs. Clinton contends that an expanding economy alone isn’t enough to achieve widespread gains, and data shows that growth hasn’t translated into wage gains in recent years. In 2013, median household incomes stood at levels last seen in 1995 after adjusting for inflation, while per capita output over that span increased by around 30%. In other words, the economy has been growing by around 2% annually since 2000, but that hasn’t translated into gains in middle-class incomes. The precise reasons for wage stagnation are debated by economists, but they largely reflect the forces of globalization and technology that shifted an economy from one that makes goods to one that provides services. The result: Incomes have grown mostly for skilled workers with college degrees. Mrs. Clinton will acknowledge the changing nature of the economy but say that stagnant wages aren’t the inevitable result, and that paychecks can grow with the right policy choices, according to aides. The Clinton campaign has seized on Mr. Bush’s comment that growing the economy will mean people have to “work longer hours,” though he made clear he meant people who have part-time work must be able to find full-time employment. In response, Mrs. Clinton tweeted: “Anyone who believes Americans aren’t working hard enough hasn’t met enough American workers.” A similar attack may be included in Monday’s address. One of the unanswered questions about Mrs. Clinton’s policy agenda is how sharply she will critique Wall Street and whether she’ll propose significant new regulations governing financial institutions. Mr. Sanders and the liberal base of the Democratic Party are expressing deep frustration with the financial-services industry, yet Mrs. Clinton has close ties to the world of finance. Monday’s speech is unlikely to answer these questions in full. But in it, Mrs. Clinton will decry “quarterly capitalism,” which she’ll say is focused on turning a quick profit rather than building real value, the campaign said. That problem, she’ll say, plagues many industries but is particularly rampant in the financial industry. Policies to be outlined in the future aimed at addressing that will include changes in tax policy and new rules regarding shareholder activism that seek to counter the impact of short-term thinking, the campaign said. Princeton economist Alan Blinder, who was briefed on the plan, said he expects Mrs. Clinton to call for more regulation, more taxation and a greater emphasis on financial stability. “She may surprise people with her toughness on Wall Street excesses,” the former Federal Reserve vice chairman said in an interview. “Wall Street reform will be a significant piece.” *Hillary Clinton Will Set Out a Progressive Economic Vision and Focus on Income <http://time.com/3954633/hillary-clinton-progressive-economic-vision/> // TIME // Sam Frizell – July 11, 2015* Boosting middle-class incomes is the "defining economic challenge of our time" Hillary Clinton will lay out a vision for the economy on Monday that focuses on boosting the middle class and addressing income inequality, a central part of her progressive vision of the presidency as her party tacks further to the left. In a speech at the New School in New York, the Democratic frontrunner for the presidency will seek to play a part in redefining the meaning of economic success in the U.S., saying she would focus primarily on growing middle class incomes instead of gross domestic product, the traditional metric of an economy’s value. “The measure of our economic success should be how much incomes rise for middle-class households, not an arbitrary growth figure,” an aide said, summarizing Clinton’s thinking about the economy and her coming speech on Monday. She will call rising incomes “the defining economic challenge of our time,” added the aide. Clinton’s speech on Monday comes amid a surge of support for progressive candidate Bernie Sanders, who speaks passionately about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour—a figure Clinton has yet to embrace—paid family leave, increasing taxes on the wealthy and breaking up the large Wall Street banks. With the economy growing at about 2% a year since 2000, and real incomes largely unchanged over the same period as the gap between rich and poor grows, populist views have become the spirit of the times for many voters. Many of those progressive tenets, which are increasingly become the prevailing views of the Democratic party, are part of Clinton’s speech on Monday. The speech will present a marked contrast between her ideas, and those of Republicans, whom she will accuse of offering a top-down, outdated and Reagan-era approach that only fuels the growth of wealth for the richest Americans through tax cuts and worsens income inequality. She will say that her own plans involve a conscious focus on middle class incomes. Specifically, Clinton will call for raising the minimum wage, fighting wage theft, supporting unions and collective bargaining, and increasing taxes on the wealthy in order to address income inequality, her aide said. In order to create more jobs, Clinton’s campaign said, the candidate will call for tax breaks for small businesses, expanding America’s clean energy sector and creating an infrastructure bank. The economy, she will say, is flawed for favoring financial trading and the banking industry over the production of goods and trade. Clinton will discuss an economy that favors more durable middle class economic growth. She’ll also likely delve into a wonkier approach, previewing new rules on shareholder activism and taxes to counter overly short-term thinking about the economy, as well as call for more research and development, and infrastructure rebuilding. Clinton’s economic plan was formulated through conversations with more than 200 domestic policy experts over the last several months, the aide said, and Clinton herself consulted with dozens of economists and other thinkers. Among the advisers that helped shape Clinton’s vision are some of the giants in progressive economics, including Joseph Stiglitz, Alan Blinder, Alan Krueger, Neera Tanden and many others. Management of the policy formulation was handled by her longtime aide at the State Department, Jake Sullivan, and Ann O’Leary and Maya Harris. Her speech on Monday, however, may not include many of the small-bore specifics that her competitors for the Democratic nomination, Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, have already begun laying out. Sanders has called for 12 weeks of paid family leave, for example, and O’Malley has endorsed a $15 minimum wage as well. Clinton will continue to unveil specific policy ideas over the summer and the fall on a rolling basis with a series of individualized announcements on wage growth, college affordability and corporate accountability. *‘Hillarynomics’: A sneak preview <http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/07/hillarynomics-a-sneak-preview-000142> // Politico // Michael Grunwald – July 11, 2015 * Hillary Clinton has chosen the overarching economic theme of her presidential campaign: America’s middle class needs a raise. In a speech Monday at the famously progressive New School in lower Manhattan, Clinton will lay out her economic theory of the case, and her main theory is that the incomes of “everyday Americans” have remained too low for too long. At a moment when the left wing of the Democratic Party is flexing its muscles—and flocking to the rallies of her socialist challenger, Bernie Sanders—she will stick with the liberal populism that has dominated the opening months of her campaign, contrasting the good times on Wall Street and corporate boardrooms with the wage stagnation of the middle class. But an outline of the speech provided by a campaign aide suggested that she will strike less of a rabble-rousing tone than Sanders, challenging “top-down” Republican policies without suggesting that capitalism is inherently rigged against families on the bottom. The speech is supposed to be a vision statement, not a laundry list of agenda items, and Clinton intends to roll out a series of specific policy proposals in the coming weeks. But the aide said she will preview several of those proposals, including more generous family leave policies, additional tax increases for the wealthy, and new corporate governance rules that would discourage short-term quick-buck thinking. President Obama has been describing his own policies as “middle-class economics,” and Clinton is walking a fine line as she tries to distinguish herself from her former rival (when she ran for president) and boss (when she served as secretary of state) without criticizing his policies, which remain broadly popular among Democrats. In her speech, she will praise Obama for dragging the economy back from the brink of a depression in 2009, and for specific actions like his recent push to expand overtime pay. But even though markets have thrived and unemployment has drooped under Obama, her primary focus will be middle-class incomes that have barely outpaced inflation over the last four decades, a problem she will describe as the defining economic challenge facing the next president. Clinton’s aide said she will discuss some of the structural forces conspiring against sustainable wage growth, such as globalization, automation, and even consumer-friendly “sharing economy” firms like Uber and Airbnb that are creating new relationships between management and labor (and which now employ many Obama administration alumni). But she will argue that policy choices have contributed to the problem, and that she can fix it. “There’s a commonly held view that there’s nothing to do about some of these global trends—a kind of ‘it is what it is’ thinking,” says Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, a longtime Clinton confidante who advised the campaign about the speech. “Hillary has never given in to that kind of pessimism.” The campaign provided an unmistakably left-leaning list of advisers who were consulted about the speech and the economic agenda Clinton plans to roll out in the coming weeks. They included some of Obama’s most liberal former aides, like Christina Romer, who chaired his Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, who was Vice President Biden’s chief economist. They also included progressive economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Jacob Hacker and Heather Boushey. Clinton plans to refer to the prosperity America enjoyed during her husband Bill’s presidency, but Wall Street-friendly Clintonworld centrists like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin were notably absent from the list. Clinton does not want to run in her husband’s shadow, especially in a primary where his record on issues like free trade and financial regulation is not a selling point with some Democratic partisans .She will emphasize Monday that today’s economic challenges are very different from the ones President Clinton faced at the dawn of the Internet age. She is well aware that younger Republican candidates like Marco Rubio and Scott Walker hope to frame 2016 as a choice between the future and the past. In any case, as the clear Democratic front-runner, Clinton is eager to draw contrasts with her potential GOP opponents on the right, not with Sanders or Martin O’Malley, another primary challenger from the left. A campaign official said she will call out Republicans for promising a new era of economic growth—Jeb Bush has declared a 4 percent annual target—while making familiar promises that high-end tax cuts will trickle down to ordinary families. “The measure of our economic success should be how much incomes rise for middle-class households, not some arbitrary growth figure,” the official said. “She firmly believes that yes, we have to grow. But we have to grow together.” To critics, this sounds like political pablum, warmed-over Obamanomics, a new spin on the president’s “we’re-in-this-together” versus “you’re-on-your-own” frame. Republicans believe this approach isn’t popular and isn’t working. “In the Obama economy, the typical American household has seen its income decline,” said Bush campaign spokeswoman Kristy Campbell. “Hillary Clinton is proposing the same failed policies that are stagnating growth and making it harder for businesses to hire and the middle class to achieve rising incomes.” At the New School, Clinton will introduce a three-part strategy for boosting wages that will signal the kinds of policies she’s likely to unveil in the near future. The first part of the strategy is to increase investment in good-paying jobs while reducing barriers that can deter Americans, especially women, from joining the workforce. She will voice support for small business tax relief, an infrastructure bank that could generate construction jobs while improving the competitiveness of the economy, and clean energy projects that reduce carbon emissions while putting people to work. At the same time, she will foreshadow proposals to expand child care, paid family leave and paid sick days, citing surveys suggesting that nearly half of working parents have passed up jobs that conflicted with family obligations. She will point out that America’s labor participation rate for women has dropped from 7th to 19th among developed nations since 1990, and will argue that it’s become too hard for Americans to be good workers and good parents at the same time. The second part of Clinton’s strategy will address inequality, a hot issue in progressive circles, although her focus will remain on the middle class rather than the poor. She will argue that vast concentrations of wealth in relatively few hands actually squelch economic growth, and that the current rules of the road tend to reward financial trading rather than manufacturing and other more productive activities. She will propose to expand on Obama’s high-income tax hikes, while also pushing measures to fight wage theft, raise the minimum wage, encourage profit-sharing for workers, and support collective bargaining by unions. The third plank of the strategy is a bit less predictable, a push for longer-term thinking in the business world. Clinton will denounce the mindset of “quarterly capitalism,” where executives (particularly on Wall Street) focus on making a quick buck rather than building lasting value, creating “bubble-driven growth” that could evaporate quickly. She will propose to undo incentives that fuel this short-term approach; promote investment in worker training, research and development, and other sources of long-term growth; and support new mechanisms for shareholder activism, presumably when it comes to reining in executive compensation. None of this is startling stuff. It’s mostly the elements of liberalism that poll well. And it does not represent a break from the Obama era. But it does recognize that while the jobless rate has dropped from a peak of 10 percent in October 2009 to 5.3 percent today, while the S&P stock index has soared from below 700 in March 2009 to nearly 2,000 today, while productivity and consumer confidence are rising, median incomes are still lower than they were before the Great Recession. In 2016, Republicans will try to blame this on Obama; Democrats will argue that Obama cleaned up the economic disaster he inherited from George W. Bush. But Clinton is trying to make it clear early that she does not think the status quo of modest growth with modest wages is acceptable. To do that, though, she will use the kind of rhetoric that Obama uses all the time—giving the middle class a break, bottom-up rather than top-down, growth for the many, not just for the few. “What’s amazing to contemplate is that we’re in year six of this recovery and we’re still recovering,” said Bernstein, the former Biden adviser who is now at the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “From the perspective of the middle class, it’s glaringly obvious that growth is necessary but not sufficient. People need to feel in their gut that the next president really understands the economic challenges they face, and will find a way to connect growth to their prosperity.” In 2008, Obama did a better job than Clinton at appealing to people’s guts. And her husband, of course, was a master of the emotional appeal. On Monday, she will praise both of them, but she will also launch a crusade to persuade the middle class that she can produce the lasting prosperity that has eluded her predecessors. *Hillarynomics: Boosting Middle Class, Disciplining Wall Street <http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-11/hillary-clinton-campaign-previews-economic-policy-proposals> // Bloomberg // Jennifer Epstein – July 11, 2015 * Hillary Clinton will embrace the Democratic Party's focus on shared prosperity for all Americans in a major speech on Monday laying out policies at the core of her second White House bid, arguing that the top economic priority for the next president must be to boost middle class wages. Tighter rules on Wall Street must be part of the equation, as well as tax reform, more support for women and families, and a higher minimum wage, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination will say during the first major economic policy speech of her campaign. Clinton is scheduled to speak at the The New School, a university in New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood known for encouraging progressive thought on economic and foreign policy. Clinton plans to specifically critique the financial services industry on what she regards as bloated compensation levels and an obsession with short-term profits, said a campaign official who agreed to preview Clinton's speech on the condition of anonymity. But don't expect details on where she stands on reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act (the bank regulation law that Clinton's husband repealed) or how she intends to ensure that the CEOs and hedge fund managers she's derided from the stump pay what she considers their fair share of taxes. The specifics of Clinton's policy proposals, including how to pay for measures that would come at a cost to the federal government, will come later, to be rolled out through the rest of the summer and into the early fall. The Predecessors, Competitors In her speech, Clinton will attempt to both associate herself and differentiate herself from two immediate past Democratic presidents: her husband, Bill Clinton, who presided over the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, and her political rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama. While hailing their records, Clinton will argue that the economic task ahead of the next president is very different from theirs. During Bill Clinton's administration, she will note, the Internet and globalization were not the pervasive factors in the economy that they are today; and Clinton will argue that Obama's energies were focused on keeping the country out of depression after a near economic meltdown in the months before he took office. She sees her challenge as managing what her campaign describes as "tectonic forces" — automation and globalization — that are squeezing the middle class. "She's addressing the challenges of the economy in the moment we're in. It's not the economy of the '90s or even when she last ran for president," said Neera Tanden, a longtime Clinton policy adviser who is president of the Center for American Progress, a policy research group. "These are different times. These are different challenges. And she has different ideas." Clinton also aims to distinguish herself from presidential hopefuls to her right and her left – in particular, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, respectively. She will argue that setting an arbitrary goal for gross domestic product growth and hoping that the benefits trickle down to the middle class is the wrong approach, as is looking for ways to redistribute wealth without encouraging growth, the campaign official said. The former secretary of state plans to call out Republicans for paying lip service to income inequality while pushing economic policies favored by their party since Ronald Reagan was president, the official said. In attacking candidates who want to specify GDP goals, Clinton is targeting Bush, who said in June he would usher in a decade of 4 percent annual U.S. growth. "You cant just say, 'I'm all about growth' and maybe suggest cutting taxes for rich people to get there, " said Jared Bernstein, former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden and now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in a jab at Bush and other Republicans. "You've got to say what you're going to do to close the gap between macroeconomic growth and middle class prosperity." While there are "a lot of steps between here and there, and some of those steps need to go through Congress, which won't be easy," Bernstein, who was briefed on the speech by Clinton's team but has not aligned himself with any candidate, said he thinks Clinton is headed in the right direction. "What matters most to the electorate right now, to the extent that it's paying attention, is having an architecture that reconnects growth to middle class wages." Clinton is not expected to be as direct in going after the other candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, though she will say that it's not enough to simply find a more equitable way to divide the existing economic pie, and that measures to expand growth must be part of the equation. Sanders, Clinton's closest opponent or the Democratic nomination, according to the polls, is a self-identified socialist who wants to raise taxes on the rich, boost the minimum wage and make college education free. Clinton's plan for jump-starting the economy is based on three goals: boosting workforce participation and increasing public-private investments; rewarding work more fairly; and encouraging long-term thinking and sustainable business strategies. Each of those areas includes subsets of policies that she will outline on Monday and detail in the weeks to come. The Goals In the first category, Clinton will stress the need to make it easier for Americans – especially women – to enter, stay in and thrive in the workforce, and point to forthcoming policy announcements on child care, paid leave and paid sick days. Clinton will also repeat the calls she's already made for a mix of public and private sector forces to come together to create an infrastructure bank and to make the U.S. the global leader in clean energy. She will also say that she supports new ways of finding tax relief for small businesses. "Good family policy is actually good economics," said former Obama Council of Economics chair Alan Krueger. "The idea to break down barriers to make it easier for more people to participate in the labor force is important." Second, Clinton will urge that work be rewarded more fairly through policy changes on compensation and taxation. She will back raising the federal minimum wage and doing more to ensure pay equity for women, and also echo Obama's proposal to expand access to overtime pay. She will question why some types of work -- specifically, financial trading -- is rewarded much more than other work, such as manufacturing. Leaving the details for later, Clinton will also mention her plans for tax reform aimed at ensuring the wealthy are paying their fair share, as well as a proposal intended to encourage companies to offer profit sharing for rank-and-file workers, already previewed during a June speech. Third, she will stress the need for more sustainable business practices over the focus on "quarterly capitalism," the campaign official said, by arguing that the obsession with meeting shareholders' expectations for profits prevents companies from making wise long-term decisions. Clinton will cite Wall Street as the quintessential example of an industry where the focus on short-term profits ultimately proves detrimental to the broader economy. But "it's not a jihadist speech against them," Tanden said. "It's not that people are doing crazy things that are evil. It's more like, they're not doing things that are helpful in the long term. There's a problem when the last thing a CEO wants to do is invest in their business and raise wages." Clinton will also aim to shift incentives by reforming the tax code and creating new mechanisms for governing shareholder activism. As with her other proposals, she plans to fill in more details as the campaign unfolds. In attacking unsustainable growth, Clinton aims to set up a clear contrast with Bush, the Republican whom her advisers still see as her most likely general election adversary. Florida's economy grew faster than the national average during Bush's eight years in governor, as housing and tourism boomed. But Democrats plan to point out that the prosperity was short-lived: after Bush left office in 2007, as the housing market and the broader economy tanked, so too did Florida's economy. The Advisers In developing the speech and its underlying policy positions, Clinton and her aides consulted with more than 200 domestic policy experts over several months, the campaign official said. The process – which included hours-long meetings with the candidate herself – was led by senior policy advisers Jake Sullivan, Maya Harris and Ann O’Leary. Also taking part was Gary Gensler, the campaign’s chief financial officer and a former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission who has advocated for stricter rules for Wall Street. Aware that the names of those advising the campaign on the economy will be interpreted as an indication of the deeper direction of its policy, the official offered a list of 10 people who are center-left and have few ties to the financial services industry. The group includes longtime Clinton advisers including Tanden, former Clinton and Obama National Economic director Gene Sperling, former Clinton Council of Economic Advisers chair Joseph Stiglitz, and Alan Blinder, who worked in the Clinton White House and served as Federal Reserve vice chairman from 1994 to 1996. Two of Obama's former CEA chairs – Krueger and Berkeley professor Christina Romer – have both advised the campaign, as have New York University law professor David Kamin, Duke business professor Ronnie Chatterji, Yale political science professor Jacob Hacker and Heather Boushey, executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. One person omitted from the official’s list, but who has been among the many economic experts consulted by the campaign, is Larry Summers, treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and National Economic Council director under Obama. While Summers once opposed tighter regulation of the financial markets, he now embraces "inclusive prosperity," allowing the many – and not just the few – to benefit from capitalism. New School labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci, who's known for suggesting that the 401(k) retirement model be replaced with a government-run program, has also spoken with Clinton aides. Despite Sanders' rising poll numbers, Monday's speech is not expected to pander to the far left. "There aren't any dogwhistles about a labor-capital struggle," Ghilarducci said. "It's a very hardcore, post-World War 2 understanding of the modern economy, a full-throated defense that you can't have a healthy economy without investment by the public sector and by the private sector. They're complementary." Though her policy proposals aren't in the speech, Ghilarducci plans to arrive early for a front-row seat. *UPDATE 2-US firms' thirst for quick profits hurts workers, Clinton will say <http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/11/usa-election-clinton-idUSL1N0ZR0EF20150711> // Reuters //Jonathan Allen – July 11, 2015* (Adds detail on Dodd-Frank support, universal pre-school, economist comments) Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will argue in a speech on Monday that U.S. businesses are too fixated on short-term profits, especially on Wall Street, and she will pledge to help workers get better pay and more family-friendly workplaces. Clinton, the favorite to win the Democratic Party's nomination for the November 2016 election, intends the speech to outline the economic theory underpinning her campaign, in which she has promised to be a champion for "everyday Americans." Her nearest rival for the nomination, the socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, has drawn large crowds and has been steadily narrowing Clinton's lead in polls by staking out positions that reflect the leftward shift of their party's base. Speaking at a historically progressive university in New York City, Clinton will say the size of the U.S. economy is best increased by policies that directly enrich the middle class, not by allowing wealth to accumulate among the richest few, according to an overview of the speech provided by her campaign and interviews with advisers. The details and costs of her proposals will be made public later, the campaign said. This delay may add to complaints, especially from her party's progressive wing, that her platform remains too vague to appraise. Teresa Ghilarducci, an informal campaign adviser and a labor economist at the New School, where Clinton will give her speech, said the economic platform was not radical, but will show how her campaign pledges so far fit together in a coherent model. "It's a substantial argument that the government needs to complement private investment, and together they lead to economic growth," she said. Take Clinton's expected call for federal support of universal pre-school, Ghilarducci said: in the short term, it helps free up toddlers' parents who want to work; in the long-term, it produces a more skilled workforce, she said. Steve Moore, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has helped design the flat-tax plan espoused by Rand Paul, a Republican senator for Kentucky running for president, said Clinton's proposals would likely hinder the economy and she would struggle to convince voters their stagnant fortunes might change. "She's going to have a hard time selling a program of increasing middle class incomes when the president she worked for lowered them," he said, referring to Clinton's stint as President Barack Obama's secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. ECONOMIC BUBBLES On financial institutions, a favorite target of the left, Clinton has demurred to date on whether big Wall Street banks should be broken up by separating commercial banking from investment banking, as some in her party have called for as necessary to avoid a repeat of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. But outside advisers to the campaign say she is expected to defend at a later date the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, which has been attacked by Republicans since its 2010 passage, and even say that it does not go far enough. Clinton will say that laws and the tax codes reward financial trading too generously, while undervaluing other industries, such as construction and manufacturing. Ghilarducci said a draft of the speech given to her by the campaign has Clinton calling for the closing of the carried interest tax loophole that allows many fund managers to pay a lower tax rate on much of their earnings. Clinton took this position in her last presidential campaign in 2007. The financial services industry is also too focused on short-term growth and quarterly reports, which creates economic bubbles that leave the middle class in the lurch, Clinton will say. Creating new rules on shareholder activism will help counter this, and she will argue for greater investment in infrastructure through an infrastructure bank and in research, including development of new sustainable energy sources. Her rival Sanders has suggested increasing the tax rate for the richest Americans to more than 50 percent. Clinton has spoken only of reforming the tax code so the rich pay a fair share. Clinton will say she wants to make it easier for people, and women in particular, to work by increasing access to child care, paid leave and paid sick days, areas where the United States is stingy compared to most other developed nations. Clinton will again say the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour should be raised, although the size of the increase she has in mind remains unclear. Clinton is likely to disparage, at least indirectly, a central pledge of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the favorite for the Republican nomination, who said he would aim to virtually double the U.S. economic growth rate to 4 percent. Economic success is better measured by how much incomes rise for middle-class people, she will say, rather than by any arbitrary growth target. (Writing by Jonathan Allen; Additional reporting by Luciana Lopez in New York and Amanda Becker and Alistair Bell in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin, David Gregorio and Frances Kerry) *Clinton’s Big Economic Speech Will Go Heavy on Middle Class Wages <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/11/clinton-economic-speech_n_7776036.html?1436634144> // HuffPo // Sam Stein – July 11, 2015 * In her first major economic policy speech on Monday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faces dual tasks: contrasting her agenda with the leading Republican presidential candidates and embracing -- while still drawing distinctions from -- the president she hopes to succeed. The former will come quite easily. The latter requires a deft touch. Appearing at The New School, Clinton will attempt to thread this needle by taking a cue from her husband’s 1992 presidential bid. She’ll keep it simple, distilling her vision into a single idea: it’s about middle-class incomes, stupid. Her policy suggestions are meant to supplement that proposition. According to the campaign, Clinton will offer a three-pronged vision that her aides say is designed to raise wages and protect workers. She will call for greater public and private investments in infrastructure, clean energy and medical research; tax breaks for small businesses and policies to encourage workforce participation, especially among women, including paid leave and paid sick days, better child care services and access to education. She will argue for greater wage equality, including a raising of the minimum wage, hikes on the wealthy (or, in campaign parlance: “making sure the wealthiest pay their fair share”) and company profit-sharing for employees. And she will encourage a rethinking of business strategy, away from what an aide called “quarterly capitalism” and more towards long-term sustainability. The speech is the product of conversations with more than 200 domestic policy experts over the last several months, including dozens held by Clinton herself, aides say. The underlying political message of the address is quite clear, as is its intended audience. Simply calling for 4 percent economic growth, as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has done while running his own campaign, isn’t good enough. “The measure of our economic success should be how much incomes rise for middle-class households, not an arbitrary growth figure,” said a Clinton campaign official who previewed the speech on the condition of anonymity. “[W]e should pursue a rise in GDP through strategies that will ensure middle-class incomes grow alongside corporate profits and executive compensation.” To make this case, Clinton is embracing the liberal wing of her party (in broad details at least; the white papers for her proposals will come in time, her campaign says). The ideas she is discussing, one official said, echo the themes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s old book -- The Two-Income Trap -- and adapt them to a modern economic climate. Clinton's speech will take on the shortcomings of automation and the sharing economy (think: Uber, Airbnb), making the case that these trends, while valuable, need to come with better policies for workers. Clinton’s critics will argue that she is a touch late to this game. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has risen in Democratic primary polls by hammering this message well before he became a candidate. This past week, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley introduced financial industry reform proposals that position him as one of the toughest candidates in the field when it comes to Wall Street. Appearing to be playing catch-up isn’t the only risk Clinton runs. In arguing that the country needs to grapple with multi-generational trends that have seen middle-class incomes stagnate, she also must account for the Democratic presidents at the wheel during this time period, one of whom is her husband, the other of whom she worked for. Clinton will, at the outset of her speech, praise the successful records of Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama, according to a campaign official. And she will ascribe the absence of wage growth over the last six-and-a-half years to the terrible economic circumstances inherited by the current administration. The president, her argument will go, couldn’t afford to be choosy with policies as he pulled the country out of an economic ditch. “President Obama has had to deal for most of his two terms with restoring growth, including reviving and stabilizing the credit system, bailing out the auto industry, arresting the nightmarish declines in growth, jobs, home prices. Only recently has he been able to think about policies, like the new [overtime] rules,” Jared Bernstein, a former top economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and a leading progressive economic voice who advised the Clinton campaign on the speech, said in an email. Clinton can afford to be choosy in her policies, the thinking goes. And her economic vision does include areas where she appears to adopt subtly different approaches from the current administration, such as calling for additional health care reforms that lower costs and supporting collective bargaining rights. "I think you'll see in the speech that she thinks both Obama and Bill Clinton made progress in the economy, important progress. But today, we have new challenges that call for new ideas," Neera Tanden, head of the Clinton-allied Center for American Progress and an adviser on this speech, said in an email. "We do face a problem with wage stagnation. President Obama has championed important ideas to address it (e.g. minimum wage) but she has her own additional ideas, which you'll see on Monday. And she also brings new issues to the debate: the rise of short-termism in the private sector is having an impact on wages as well." *Clinton will unveil aggressive economic agenda that targets Wall Street, high earners <http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-clinton-economy-20150711-story.html#page=1> // LA Times // Evan Halper – July 11, 2015 * After months of running on broad themes backed by little in the way of actual policy proposals, aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton say that on Monday she will announce a far-reaching plan to restructure the economy to move more of the nation’s wealth to middle- and low-wage earners. In what the campaign bills as a landmark speech at the New School in New York City, Clinton will offer a vision for growth that is notably different from the one her husband, Bill Clinton, pursued when he was in the White House and pivots off some of the policies of President Obama. The agenda, written with input from some of the country’s most liberal economists, reflects not just Hillary Clinton’s effort to appeal to a Democratic party that has drifted leftward, but also disenchantment with the centrist economic policies she once favored. It seeks to address what has become one of the key concerns of voters this election season: the failure of the economy to raise middle-class income. The problem has consumed policy advisors for both Republicans and Democrats, and strategies for solving it are emerging at the center of every campaign. “The moment we are in today is unique,” said Neera Tanden, an advisor on the Clinton plan who runs the Center for American Progress, a think tank influential in the campaign. “The old rule of economic growth that when workers are more productive, companies reward them with wage increases no longer applies.” After decades in which virtually all working Americans saw their paychecks increase, growth became uneven in the 1980s, and over the past 15 years, it stopped altogether for most families. Clinton is seeking to draw a distinction from Republicans — and Jeb Bush in particular — who are focusing their message on more general economic growth. Bush set his central economic goal as boosting the rate at which the gross domestic product increases. Clinton will frame the election as taking place in the dawn of a new and troubling economic era, which bears little resemblance to the one Bill Clinton ushered in before the Internet revolution and globalization took hold. She will note how her challenge differs from that of Obama, whose actions were shaped largely around fixing the immediate financial crisis he inherited. At the center of Hillary Clinton’s agenda will be tax proposals that push the financial burden of government away from the middle class and small businesses toward higher earners, as well as new rules for the financial sector. Campaign aides say Clinton will begin previewing some of those proposals Monday, followed by a rollout of the details in weeks to come. “Income inequality has become a bigger part of the national discussion,” said Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton who is advising the campaign. “People have the correct feeling that the system is not fair. … Hillary will dispute the notion that the only thing we need to care about is getting the economy growing faster. It's not just that the pie gets bigger, but how that pie is shared.” Amid concerns by progressives that Clinton, who represented New York in the Senate and has deep political ties to the financial industry, would be reluctant to interfere with the business of investment firms, the candidate will promise to do exactly that. She will target what the campaign calls a mindset of “quarterly capitalism” on Wall Street — a focus on making a quick return with little regard for how it is being generated — that she says has pushed the economy too far away from creating things of real value. The speech is a prelude to specific taxes and shareholder engagement rules Clinton will later propose that her advisors say would have the effect of redeploying Wall Street capital toward more durable sources of economic growth, such as research and development and infrastructure. Clinton will argue Wall Street is failing the middle class by not keeping its focus on those investments that help generate jobs and upward mobility within companies. Economists who worked on the plan say she will target “excessive risk taking” and churn of investments, as well as what Democrats argue are loopholes in the tax code that reward such behavior. “These will be areas where she inevitably will be more robust than President Obama was able to be, with the crisis he inherited,” said Gene Sperling, an economic advisor to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who worked on the Hillary Clinton plan. Clinton will try to frame the policies favored by all the GOP candidates as ultimately rooted in outdated trickle-down economics, which she says have helped fuel growth but also inequality. Clinton is embracing an argument that so-called New Democrats like she and her husband had long resisted: that income inequality is actually slowing growth, and even policies that boost the earnings of lower earners can be harmful to the economy if they result in the gap between the wealthy and everyone else growing. What that means for her agenda is that it will include provisions aimed squarely at reducing the share of earnings kept by the richest Americans. They are the kind of policies being demanded by the increasingly influential wing of the Democratic party led by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist running against Clinton — though Warren and Sanders would push the economy much further in the direction Clinton is now pointing toward. Embedded within the Clinton agenda will be many of the specific programs restive progressives have been demanding she embrace. Though Clinton will not reveal any specifics Monday, aides say the plan includes an increase in the minimum wage, a lowering of the debt burden on college students and new rules for corporate accountability. There also will be provisions to strengthen unions, such as expanded collective bargaining rights. Clinton has had an uneasy relationship with labor of late. Her reluctance to take a position on the massive free trade agreement Obama is negotiating with Pacific nations has been a sore point. Union leaders warn the trade deal will cost American jobs and hurt workers. Boosting paid family leave and availability of childcare, two signature Clinton issues, also will be part of her plan, as will the establishment of an “infrastructure bank” to fund the construction of public works projects. Boosting government investment in clean energy is also included. The proposal comes as Clinton’s standing in the polls in early voting states, while still strong, has slipped notably. Sanders has gained considerable support in Iowa and New Hampshire as he rails against Wall Street, calls for expanding Social Security and unapologetically pushes to boost a variety of taxes on the wealthy. Clinton’s plan comes with a major shift in thinking among some of the country’s elite economists. Centrists like Lawrence Summers, who helped guide the economic policies of Bill Clinton’s administration, have recast their advice in the face of statistics showing Americans are not sharing equally in growth. The economists are increasingly concerned by the way technology, automation and globalization may be creating new opportunities but are also stripping away the job protections and wage growth that long existed. “There are a number of new forces leading to the stagnation,” said David Kamin, a law professor at New York University who helped craft Hillary Clinton's plan. “But they don’t make it inevitable. She plans to lay out real policy choices we can make to raise incomes.” The unveiling of Clinton’s economic strategy is not just welcome by Democratic primary voters. Clinton’s GOP rivals are eager to dig into the details, which they will frame as a costly burden on the country. The kinds of changes Clinton envisions ultimately could involve billions of dollars in new taxes on certain segments of the economy, even as tax relief is directed toward small businesses and low wage earners. *Hillary Clinton laces up her partisan boxing gloves for economic speech <http://www.vox.com/2015/7/11/8933849/Clinton-partisan-economy-speech> // Vox // Jonathan Allen – July 11, 2015 * Hillary Clinton will hammer Republicans when she outlines her economic vision for America on Monday. In particular, she'll go after Republicans, including Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, who have framed their economic plans around a hard-to-achieve 4 percent annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate rather than building a system that is both more fair to all Americans and geared for sustainable growth, according to her campaign. "The measure of our economic success should be how much incomes rise for middle-class households, not an arbitrary growth figure," a Clinton campaign official said. "She firmly believes that yes, we have to grow. But we have to grow together – meaning, we should pursue a rise in GDP through strategies that will ensure middle-class incomes grow alongside corporate profits and executive compensation. That’s the key." The basic argument, according to the campaign: Republicans aren't offering anything different than the trickle-down theory of the Reagan era, which posited that aiming benefits to the wealthiest in America would goose the economy and lift the middle and lower classes. Clinton will make the case that helping the middle class will spur growth. Her own plans — mostly standard Democratic fare — probably won't thrill the Bernie Sanders crowd. But they should create enough of a contrast with leading Republicans to assure most Democratic voters that she's clearly left of center. She'll propose raising taxes on wealthy investors, boosting wages for low-income workers, and invest public and private money in infrastructure and jobs of the future, according to a release from her campaign. It's likely that Clinton will hold back a few wrinkles as surprises for Monday's speech at the New School in New York City. The speech is designed to build the framework for policies she will detail more fully in a series of announcements over the summer. The campaign broke it down into three major pillars: Increase private/public investment and unleash workforce participation Reward work more fairly to reduce inequality Encourage long-term thinking and more sustainable business strategies Under the first category, Clinton will propose directing federal and private investments to an infrastructure bank and clean energy jobs and reiterate her support for policies that provide for child care, paid leave and paid sick days as an important component of strengthening the workforce. She'll also argue that a high concentration of wealth retards economic growth as an explanation for a series of proposals aimed at raising revenue from the richest Americans and providing benefits to laborers. The list includes raising the minimum wage, backing collective bargaining rights for workers, increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans and cutting health-care costs. To the chagrin of Democratic interest groups, Clinton is unlikely to put a lot of flesh on the bone in Monday's speech, preferring to roll out detailed policies at a slower pace in the coming months. But with the final top-tier Republican contender — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — getting into the race later Monday, Clinton is clearly most interested in ensuring she's contrasting her theory of economic success with that of the GOP.