Dwyer: Clinton is getting away with policy malpractice

Hillary Clinton has given another fine speech about the economy. It was supposed to lay out her plans to create jobs, boost growth and restore income equality, in response to Donald Trump’s economic address a few days earlier. Clinton’s only new idea, however, was an expansion to an existing child tax credit. Beyond that, there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be gleaned from her website.

Maybe she feels she doesn’t have to do more — that all she has to do is stay on-message and remind voters she’s not Donald Trump. But with only 12 weeks before Election Day, voters still don’t know which of Clinton’s hundreds of proposals are her top priorities, or how she’d get Congress’ support for ideas both parties have rejected before.

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This campaign has little substantive give-and-take on the great issues of our day, such as: What size government do we really want and how much can we afford? How will the next president deal with the coming explosion in retirement costs that will send the federal deficit soaring? Do budget deficits matter? What’s really driving college tuition up and up, and what should be done to stop it?

Unfortunately, the coming debates are unlikely to shed much light, either, considering how little interest Trump has in the details of policy. But maybe the moderators can use them to get some answers out of her, as a substitute for the press conferences she has so assiduously avoided. Here’s my list of the three most important missing-in-action policy discussions:

▪ Trade. We know that Clinton opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership that she supported as secretary of state. What we don’t know is whether she would accept minor changes to the deal Barack Obama negotiated and pronounce those concessions adequate, or ditch the agreement entirely. The difference is huge, yet she has never been asked to explain what would make the existing agreement less of a job-killer or wage-dampener.

Her campaign warded off Sanders’ attempts to extract a pledge not to submit the trade deal to Congress. Is she leaving herself wiggle room to send a slightly amended treaty to Congress, or is she going to insist, for example, on language barring countries from manipulating their currencies to get a leg up in trade, or revoking the intellectual-property protections for pharmaceutical companies?

Either one could be a deal-killer for Congress or for other countries, most of which will resist changes to a treaty they already made politically difficult concessions over.

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▪ Health care. Clinton reiterated her support for a so-called public option health-insurance plan. Does this mean anyone qualifying for a policy on an exchange could choose a federally run health plan instead of a private one? Or would she give only those over, say, age 55 a chance to buy into Medicare? By what authority would she require Republican-controlled state legislatures to offer a public option?

For that matter, how would she win over congressional Democrats? Would public-option premiums be lower than those for private health plans — that seems to be the purpose, after all — and why wouldn’t that cause more insurers to abandon Obamacare, an outcome the program can hardly afford?

▪ Taxes: For every one of her new spending proposals — to repair infrastructure, make community college tuition-free, reduce child-care costs, put broadband in every home by 2020, and so on — Clinton promises to cover the cost, collecting about $1.6 trillion in new tax revenue over a decade.

But her tax increases prove counter-productive. For example, she would require those making $1 million or more to pay at least a 30 percent income tax. High earners would also lose such loopholes as the one for private-equity earnings. The well-off would have to give up about a third of the value of their deductions for such things as mortgage interest and charitable contributions and would have to hold assets for six years, instead of one, to get the lowest capital-gains tax rate. Then she would impose a 4 percent tax surcharge on earnings above $5 million.

All told, the top marginal tax rate jumps above 50 percent, a large increase over the 39.6 percent in current law and one Congress will likely be reluctant to impose, even if Democrats pick up more seats.

What’s missing in all the minutiae is a formal tax plan, which Clinton keeps promising but has yet to offer, even as she hints of a forthcoming middle-class tax cut proposal.

Also missing is any discussion of what all her tax increases would do to investment, economic growth and jobs, and whether the revenue raised would cover the breadth of her new spending proposals. (One recent analysis says she would come up short by $2.2 trillion over 10 years.)

So on taxes, trade and health care, Clinton has a long way to go. If only she had an opponent who could hold her feet to the fire.

This story was originally published August 16, 2016 at 5:02 PM with the headline "Dwyer: Clinton is getting away with policy malpractice."