Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Today's WSJ opinion page is graced by an article ascribed to the Junior Senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is apparently running for President. In said article, Ms. Rodham Clinton purports to offer her formula for restored American prosperity.

We hope to offer point-by-point observations on Ms. Rodham Clinton's program, should time allow. For now, we can suggest only a few points to consider.

• Much of this program merely announces intentions, not the means to fulfilling those intentions.
• At the center is what Ms. Rodham Clinton describes as the "most aggressive" plan to address health care (really health insurance). We note that her plan is the most aggressive because it is the most radical departure from the present system, about which a large majority of Americans express personal satisfaction, though worrying about others' health insurance. We are reminded of a famous remark from the ever-insightful P. J. O'Rourke: "If you think that health care is expensive now, wait until it's free!"
• We note that in Massachusetts, Governor Romney's mandated health insurance, like Ms. Rodham Clinton's plan, has driven up costs enormously and not created universal insurance. Somehow, when government pays for something, it becomes more expensive.
• Overall, Ms. Rodham Clinton apparently does not believe that a problem as complex and longstanding as health insurance should be addressed incrementally. She favors sweeping, aggressive, immediate change for a problem whose roots are in the price and wage controls of the 1940s and whose span encompasses the single largest segment of the economy, not to mention the lives and health of all the Republic's citizens. If in the health care game America is behind five runs in the bottom of the 9th with no runners on base, Ms. Rodham Clinton apparently believes that the best strategy is to swing from the heels.
• Ms. Rodham Clinton's discussion of health care in particular and govenment in general is laced with language about controlling costs. That means, of course, limiting the availability of certain kinds of services. The notion that government can be more efficient than private enterprise in distributing services has little theoretical or empirical support. At any rate, we recall that Vice President Gore was charged with comprehensive governmental reform in the 1990s. And how did that help, exactly?
• Much of what is presented as policies for the economic well being of all is actually for the benefit of certain favored classes. Specifically, we wonder how a program to get more women and minorities in STEM careers is important for global competetiveness, as opposed to getting more Americans in general in those fields (if indeed more are needed, an open question according to many statistics). We wonder too how making it possible for a union to organize a shop without a secret ballot, the so-(Orwellian-)called Employee Free Choice Act, will accomplish prosperity for anyone, least of all in a global economy.
• Ms. Rodham Clinton speaks as if the only efficacious investment is government investment of tax funds. Our future depends on government spending on research and development, not on, say, reducing the corporate tax burden so that American industry can research its own solutions that are economically viable.
• Ms. Rodham Clinton's plan to encourage savings is coupled with promises to make savings unnecessary: shoring up Social Security, providing more government funds for higher education, solving the housing problem, providing more direct payments to the unemployed and underemployed, providing health insurance as an entitlement. The reason to save (concern about the future) evaporates if her ambitious goals are fulfilled in other areas. Ironically enough, Americans' failure to save is most optimally explained because of their relative lack of concern for their futures, thanks to the belief that government will bail them out (rather similar to the reason that mortgage lenders threw caution to the subprime wind). Ms. Rodham Clinton would have us believe that we are extremely anxious about the future but unable to save for it without an external incentive.
• Furthermore, a program of tax breaks for retirement savings sounds very much like the Bush plan to allow a part of payroll taxes to be devoted to individually controlled retirement accounts, something that Ms. Rodham Clinton vigorously opposed. We are not altogether sure why this means of accounting is better to her, except that it has the government doing more handling of the money.
• We remember the great promises of 1992, including the middle-class tax cut. Another Clinton withdrew that promise days after the election, claiming that his new access to government figures (actually the OMB's estimate of the federal deficit, a matter of public record) made him realize that such a tax cut was impossible. In this case, Ms. Rodham Clinton tells us that the plan for paying for all this is on her web site. We looked at the site and will note that (a) on the home page there's no obvious link to the pay-for-it part of the Grand Plan: (b) Google doesn't find any occurrence on the site of the phrase "pay for my economic plan," the very phrase in the WSJ article that is supposedly explained on the site.

In sum, we recall a deservedly famous song by the Who that summarizes our outlook on all these wonderful plans. For those who prefer a different kind of summation, there's always Barry Goldwater's.