"What I try to do every day is figure out how to help somebody. . . But you can try to help somebody every single day. And I’ve tried to do that as a public servant, as an activist, and now as a senator, and that’s what I will do as president.” (Hillary Clinton presidential ad)
Call us old fashioned. Or maybe call us Constitutionalists. But we can’t for the life of us figure out why or when the presidency morphed into the Salvation Army.
The president of the United States is the leader of the free world, not the leader of a charity. The Commander-in-Chief, not Mother Teresa. The one trying to grow the economy, not grow economic dependency.
When he was running for president, Bill Clinton liked to say “I feel your pain”: apparently his wife thinks she feels everyone’s pain.
We’ll let others decide whether this effort to appeal to anyone with a problem is good politics; but we are positive it is terrible economic policy.
But if a “President Clinton” is bound and determined to help someone, allow us to offer a few suggestions:
- Social Security is on track for a financial train wreck, which could hurt the retirement prospects of millions of current and future retirees. According to Social Security’s trustees, the program owes $6.8 trillion more in benefits than it will receive in taxes. Giving people the opportunity to set their own funds aside in a personal account is the only way to bypass this train wreck.
- The trustees also say that Medicare is facing an unfunded liability of $34.2 trillion over the next 75 years. The only solution is letting people put their own money aside during their working years to cover their health care in retirement. Yes that is the one solution Clinton categorically rejects.
- And finally, a temporary fix spared some 21 million Americans from getting hit with the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which would force them to pay thousands more in taxes. But the fix is only temporary.
If Hillary Clinton really wants to help someone every day, she can start with Social Security, Medicare and the AMT—either in her role as a senator or as president. Fixing those programs would help every American every day.