NEW YORK–(ENEWSPF)–June 21, 2016. Hillary Clinton just delivered a major economic policy address in which she outlined this core proposition: if Donald Trump were to get behind the wheel of the American economy, he would very likely drive us off a cliff, and working families would bear the brunt of the impact of lost jobs, lost savings, and lost livelihoods. That’s the natural conclusion when you look at Trump’s policy proposals, his rash and reckless temperament, and his record in the private sector of doing harm to working families and small businesses. Need proof? Just this week former McCain economic policy adviser Mark Zandi released a report saying that if Trump got his way he would lead our economy into a ‘lengthy recession’ that would cost millions of jobs, reduce growth, stagnate middle class incomes, and explode the debt.
See for yourself how the lines from Hillary’s Clinton’s speech today compare with Trump’s record:
A few weeks ago, I said his foreign policy proposals and reckless statements represent a danger to our national security.
Hillary Clinton: He is not just unprepared — he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability, and immense responsibility
Liberals and conservatives say Trump’s ideas would be disastrous. The Chamber of Commerce and labor unions… Mitt Romney and Elizabeth Warren… and economists on the left, right and center all agree: Trump would throw us back into recession.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka: Trump’s policies would make life exponentially worse for those who count on a paycheck.
Mitt Romney: If Donald Trump’s plans were ever implemented, the country would sink into prolonged recession.
Elizabeth Warren: When the economy is in this kind of trouble, calling on Donald Trump for help is like if your house is on fire calling an arsonist to come help out.
One of the leading firms that analyzes the top threats to the global economy – the Economist Intelligence Unit – comes out with a new list every month. It includes things like terrorism and the disintegration of Europe. And this month, #3 on the list is Donald Trump becoming president. Just think about that.
Politico: A Donald Trump presidency poses a top-10 risk event that could disrupt the world economy, lead to political chaos in the U.S. and heighten security risks for the United States, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.
The Economist: July 2016 – Trump has a score of 16 on the same list as a Eurozone breakup (15) and the “rising threat of jihadi terrorism destabilises the global economy” (12)
The Week: Donald Trump kicks off GOP debate by saying American wages are ‘too high’
TRUMP: Our wages are too high
He said – quote – “having a low minimum wage is not a bad thing for this country” – at a time when millions working full-time are still living in poverty.
TRUMP: I think having a low minimum wage is not a bad thing for this country.
Center for Poverty Research of University of California, Davis: In 2013, 4.4 million people who usually work full-time were working poor
Back in 2006, before the financial crash, he said, quote, “I sort of hope” that the housing market crashes, because he’d make money off all of the foreclosures.
Over the years, he said all kinds of things about women in the workforce. He called pregnant employees – quote – “an inconvenience.”
TRUMP: Well you know, pregnancy…it’s certainly an inconvneince for a business. And whether people want to say that or not, the fact is it is an inconvenience for a person that is running a business.
He says women will start making equal pay as soon as they do as good a job as men – as if we aren’t already.
TRUMP: You’re going to make the same if you do as good a job. And I happen to be pro-life. OK? I’m pro-life.
And he clearly doesn’t know how much of our growth over the last 40 years is thanks to women.
And he wants to end Obamacare, but he has no credible plan to replace it or to help keep costs down. It wouldn’t be good for our economy if 20 million people lost their health insurance. And it would be devastating to all those families.
What would Trump do? He said he wants to wipe out the tough rules we put on big banks.
TRUMP: Dodd-Frank has made it impossible for bankers to function…[My plan] will be close to dismantling of Dodd-Frank.
He said they created – quote – “a very bad situation.”
He also wants to repeal the new consumer watchdog that Senator Warren helped create to protect families from unfair and deceptive business practices. That new agency has already secured billions of dollars for people who’ve been ripped off. He wants to get rid of it.
Donald Trump would take us back to where we were before the crisis. He’d rig the economy for Wall Street again.
And his tax plan sure lives up to the name. According to the independent Tax Policy Center, it would increase the national debt by more than 30 trillion dollars over 20 years. That’s “trillion” with a “t.”
It’s much, much more than any nominee of either party has ever proposed.
Economists describe it with words like “simply dangerous” and “not even in the universe of the realistic.”
Glenn Hubbard, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush: Described Trump’s ideas on taxes and the budget as “unrealistic” and “simply dangerous”
Marc Goldwein, Center for a Responsible Federal Budget: “It’s not even in the universe of the realistic.”
And how would he pay for all this debt? He said, quote, “I would borrow, knowing if the economy crashed, you could make a deal. It’s like, you know, you make a deal before you go into a poker game.”
The full faith and credit of the United States is something we can just gamble away. That would cause an economic catastrophe worse than anything we experienced in 2008.
Michael Strain, economics fellow at American Enterprise Institute: When asked about Trump’s suggestion to default on the debt: “There are no merits to it. The extent to which U.S. Treasurys are kind of the foundation on which the global financial system is built is really hard to overstate.”
Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama: Called Donald Trump’s idea of not fully repaying investors in U.S. Treasuries “borderline insane”
You don’t have to take it from me. Ronald Reagan said, “We have a well-earned reputation for reliability and credibility – two things that set us apart from much of the world.”
Maybe Donald feels differently because he made a fortune filing bankruptcies and stiffing his creditors.
New York Times: How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions
The American dollar is the safest currency on the planet. Why would he want to mess with that?
Finally, the Trump campaign said that, if worst came to worst, we could just sell off America’s assets.
First, really? And second, even if we sold all our aircraft carriers and the Statue of Liberty – even if he let some billionaire turn Yosemite into a private country club – we still wouldn’t even get close. That’s how much debt he’d run up.
Government Accountability Office: The federal government’s reported assets totaled about $3.2 trillion as of September 30, 2015.
He’d give millionaires a three-trillion-dollar tax cut. Corporations would get two trillion dollars. He’s giving more away to the 120,000 richest American families than he would to 120 million hard-working people.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: Millionaires Would Gain Trillions Under Trump and Cruz Tax Plans
Tax Policy Center: An Analysis of Donald Trump’s Tax Plan
Now, before releasing his plan, Trump said, “Hedge fund guys are getting away with murder.” And, “They’ll pay more.”
TRUMP: Hedge fund guys are getting away with murder.
TRUMP: The hedge fund guys won’t like me as much as they like me right now. I know them all, but they’ll pay more.
Then his plan came out. And it actually makes the current loophole even worse. It gives hedge-fund managers a special tax rate that’s lower than what many middle-class families pay. I had to look twice because I didn’t believe it. Under Donald Trump’s plan, these Wall Street millionaires will pay a lower tax rate than many working people.
And of course, Donald himself would get a huge tax cut from his own plan. But we don’t know exactly how much – because he won’t release his tax returns.
Every major presidential candidate in the last four decades has shown the American people their taxes.
Washington Post: Trump “would be the first major-party nominee in 40 years to not release his returns.”
Donald actully told Mitt Romney to do it.
TRUMP: On Romney’s tax returns: “I think it probably be better off just to release them now”
And he said that if he ever ran for President, he’d release his.
What’s he afraid of? That we’ll learn he hasn’t paid taxes on his huge income? We know that happened for at least a few years – he paid nothing, or close to it.
The Republican primary featured the Trump immigration plan: round up and deport more than 11 million people – almost all of whom are employed or are children going to school – then build a wall across our border and force Mexico to pay for it.
TRUMP: We have many illegals in the country, and we have to get them out
This policy is both un-American and very bad economics. Kicking out 11 million immigrants would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and it would shrink our economy significantly. Some economists argue that just this policy alone would send us into a Trump Recession.
American Action Forum: The federal government would have to spend roughly $400 billion to $600 billion to address the 11.2 million undocumented immigrants and prevent future unlawful entry into the United States.
Mark Zandi, economic adviser to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign: If Trump’s policies were enacted it would be some form of disaster for the economy. If you force 11 million undocumented immigrants to leave in a year, you would be looking at a depression.
TRUMP: It’s true.
WALLACE: — and China.
TRUMP: That’s true.
Trump furniture, in Turkey;
Trump picture frames in India;
TRUMP: America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.
TRUMP: #AmericaFirst
TRUMP: #AmericaFirst
On the other hand, Donald Trump never misses a chance to say that Americans are losers and the rest of the world is laughing at us.
CNN: Donald Trump thinks pretty much everyone is a loser
Just the other day, he told a crowd that America is – quote – “not going to survive.”
He has no credible plan for rebuilding our infrastructure, apart from his wall.
- Pay for the Wall
- Healthcare Reform
- U.S.-China Trade Reform
- Veterans Administration Reforms
- Tax Reform
- Second Amendment Rights
- Immigration Reform
No ideas for how to strengthen Medicare and expand Social Security – in fact, his tax plan would endanger them.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: Under [Trump’s] plan, balancing the budget in 2026 would require cutting all government programs — including Social Security, Medicare and defense — by about two-fifths if all programs were cut by the same percentage. Balancing the budget without cutting Social Security, Medicare, and defense would require eliminating essentially the rest of government under both plans.
No real strategy for creating jobs, just a string of empty promises.
TRUMP: We’re going to save that coal industry, believe me.
Jason Bordoff, director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy: The U.S. coal industry has been in structural decline for decades, recently driven by things like weak global demand and cheap natural gas. And eliminating environmental rules protecting air and water is not going to bring those jobs back.
Maybe we shouldn’t expect better from someone whose most famous words are, “You’re fired.”
He has no clean energy plan, even though that’s where many of the jobs of the future will come from and it’s the key to a safer planet. He just says that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese.
TRUMP: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive
And he has no plan for helping urban and rural communities facing entrenched poverty and neglect.
- Pay for the Wall
- Healthcare Reform
- U.S.-China Trade Reform
- Veterans Administration Reforms
- Tax Reform
- Second Amendment Rights
- Immigration Reform
Donald Trump says he’s qualified to be president because of his business record.
A few days ago, he said, quote, “I’m going to do for the country what I did for my business.”
Over the years, he intentionally ran up huge amounts of debt on his companies and then defaulted. He bankrupted those companies – not once, not twice, but four times.
Hundreds of people lost their jobs.
Shareholders were wiped out. Lenders lost money.
Contractors – many of them small businesses – took heavy losses. Many went bust. But Donald Trump always came out fine.
USA Today: Trump [offered] as little as 30 cents on the dollar to some of the contractors
Here’s what he said about one of those bankruptcies: “I figured it was the bank’s problem, not mine. What the hell did I care?”
He also says, “I play” with bankruptcy.
Just look at what he did in Atlantic City. He put his name on buildings – his favorite thing to do. He convinced other people that his properties were a great investment, so they would go in with him. But he arranged it so he got paid no matter how his companies performed. So when his casino and hotel went bankrupt because of how badly he mismanaged them, he still walked away with millions. Everyone else paid the price. Today, his properties are sold, shuttered or falling apart. So are a lot of people’s lives.
New York Times: How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions
And here’s what he says about that: “Atlantic City was a very good cash cow for me for a long time.”
Those promises you’re hearing from him at his campaign rallies? They’re the same promises he made to his customers at Trump University. Now they’re suing him for fraud.
He’s been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits in the past 30 years.
A large number were filed by ordinary Americans and small businesses that did work for Trump and never got paid – painters, waiters, plumbers – people who needed the money, and didn’t get it – not because he couldn’t pay them, but because he could stiff them.
USA Today: At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters.
Sometimes he offered them 30 cents on the dollar for projects they had already completed.
Hundreds of liens have been filed against him by contractors, going back decades. They all tell a similar story: I worked for him, I did my job, he wouldn’t pay me what he owed.
He says, he’s a businessman, and this is what businessmen do.
Well, CNN pointed out that no major company has filed Chapter 11 more often in the last 30 years than Trump’s casinos.
Now imagine Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office the next time America faces a crisis. Imagine him being in charge when your jobs and savings are at stake. Is this who you want leading us in an emergency?
TRUMP: Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!
Source: http://www.hillaryclinton.com
