Hillary's confession

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Hillary Rodham Clinton has confessed the whole thing. She has left out few major sins. She sat down with The New York Times to outline her economic plans if elected president, and we now know the sad, sordid facts -- how confused the senator is and how intent she is on ruinous policies.We should thank her for her honesty after first reviewing some of her points, such as the notion that business is now insufficiently regulated and that government should be exercising more power in the marketplace.This supposed deficiency of governmental intervention gets no support from a glance at the Federal Register, which includes tens of thousands of pages of new, old and proposed rules. Nor does it help the thesis to note the cost of implementation, $1.1 trillion annually, according to the Small Business Administration.All of this may seem as nothing to Clinton, but some fret that these endless, frequently obnoxious and sometimes pointless rules impose thousands of dollars on an average family each year, steal liberty from individuals and inflict mayhem as they goosestep their way across the business landscape."Excessive regulation slows innovation, imposes needless costs on investors and stifles competitiveness and job creation," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. was quoted as perceptively saying last year in a speech in New York.The Democratic presidential candidate also wants to eliminate President Bush's tax cuts on households making more than $250,000 on the erroneous ground that the tax code is "out of whack" in giving kisses and hugs to the rich while doing seriously mean things to the middle class, such as stomping on their living standards.The National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas begs to differ. It points out that federal income taxes just keep getting more progressive even when you measure the effect of Bush tax cuts routinely demonized by Democrats.Any number of other analyses say the same. The share borne by the rich has been more since those cuts were enacted, not less. The middle class was a prime beneficiary. Financially, and despite obvious difficulties for some, the middle class has been leaping upward more than downward.Hiking some taxes Bush reduced wouldn't produce nearly enough revenue for any major need, such as even beginning to fix Medicare, but would deprive the economy of a healthy stimulus. She does intend to effect some middle-class tax credits, and some of her proposals would be fine if accompanied by spending reductions. But the words "reduce spending" are not part of the vocabulary of this politician whose talk of hugely expensive new public-works projects make absolutely no sense, least of all in a time of continued low unemployment.In the interview, Clinton discussed taking a closer, tougher look at what foreign governments invest in the United States, forgetting that getting back more of the dollars held overseas would be enormously invigorating and productive for our economy. In an envy-mongering mood, she waxed indignant about economically meaningless CEO salaries and wondered if a legal means might not be found to reduce them. Maybe you could get past the courts with that kind of theft, but if so, here's what we should also do: Strip Hillary and husband Bill of all their millions from book sales and his speeches.Displaying maybe the single worst idea of how to deal with the housing slump, our heroine seeks a three-month cessation of foreclosures along with a five-year hold on increases on the interest rates of mortgages lower than the prime rate. A consequence, as the Times article itself suggests, would be higher interest rates for other homeowners in order to reward those guilty of improvident decisions.The Times story tells us that Hillary Clinton is generally far more skeptical of free trade and free markets than was Bill Clinton as president. The truth is that relatively unhampered trade has produced literally millions of jobs for this nation. It has also driven down prices to far greater benefit for America's poor than any dozen new governmental programs the senator's socialistically inclined imagination might come up with.The evidence is simply insurmountable that the freer a country's economy, the better off its people are.Hillary Clinton clearly doesn't understand as much, but maybe her confession will help voters understand her.(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)