[Marxism] Is Clinton to the left of Obama on domestic policy?

[Walter Lippmann]

(Clinton is NOT to the left of Obama. Quite the opposite.
The New York Times endorsed Clinton, but posted this story 
today which argues that Obama is to the left of Clinton.
Both support capitalism, both support imperialism. Both
oppose the Cuban Revolution. But withing a capitalist
framework, Obama is clearly to the left on the domestic
issues, if only by calling for drivers licenses for the
undocumented alone.)
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Closing Income Gap Tops Obama's Agenda for Economic Change
By David Leonhardt 
The New York Times 
February 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/us/politics/02obama.html


WICHITA, Kan.

Senator Barack Obama says the top priority of the next president
should be to create a more lasting and equitable prosperity than
achieved by either President Bush in the current decade or even Bill
Clinton in the 1990s.

In an hourlong interview outlining his economic views, Mr. Obama
praised the Clinton administration for reducing the deficit and
setting the stage for the '90s boom. But he said Mr. Clinton had
failed to halt a long-term increase in income inequality that had
left the middle class feeling squeezed.

If elected, Mr. Obama said he would to try to forge a popular mandate
for policy changes that could reverse a generation of slow wage
growth and outlast any one administration. At the top of his list
would be shifting the tax burden more toward the wealthy and making
investments - in health care, alternative-energy research and
education - that would cost a significant amount of money but could
ultimately lift economic growth.

'The project of the next president is figuring out how do you create
bottom-up economic growth, as opposed to the trickle-down economic
growth that George Bush has been so enamored with,' Mr. Obama, an
Illinois Democrat, said.

Mr. Obama's agenda would be complicated by the government's projected
budget deficit, which is primarily a result of soaring Medicare and
other health care costs expected in coming decades. No candidate, in
either party, has yet offered a detailed plan for bringing those
costs under control, health care experts say.

Speaking on a flight to Kansas from Washington this week, Mr. Obama
predicted that the economy would continue to worsen in coming months.
In particular, he said he expected some of the recent problems in the
mortgage market to spread to other parts of the consumer-credit
business, as households struggled to pay bills.

'I don't think we've bottomed out yet,' he said.

Although Mr. Obama's economic approach comes wrapped in his
conciliatory rhetoric, it is in some ways more aggressive than that
of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, his rival for the
Democratic presidential nomination.

He has called for shoring up Social Security by raising payroll taxes
on very high earners, while she has not. He also favors a permanent
tax credit of up to $1,000 for families in the bottom 90 percent or
so of the income distribution, which makes his package of
middle-class tax credits significantly larger than hers.

Clinton advisers say Mr. Obama has been unrealistic about paying for
his tax cuts and would end up forfeiting the Democrats' hard-won
reputation for fiscal discipline. Obama aides say he would fully pay
for his proposals by, among other things, cracking down on overseas
tax havens and corporate tax loopholes.

Either way, the Obama program clearly emphasizes help for the middle
class - through tax cuts and new programs - more than deficit
reduction. His approach puts him somewhat to the left of the Clinton
administration but broadly in line with the Democratic Party now.

Indeed, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton hold similar or identical
positions on a host of economic issues, and Democratic economists not
aligned with either campaign often speak positively about both.

They each favor subsidies for families without health insurance
(though Mrs. Clinton would mandate that everyone has insurance, while
Mr. Obama would not). Both have also called for more government
regulation of business, somewhat tighter restrictions on foreign
trade and more investment in health care infrastructure,
alternative-energy research and other basic science.

But the two candidates offer strikingly different strategies for
achieving their economic agendas. Mrs. Clinton - drawing on her
husband's first year in the White House, when Congress passed a
deficit-reduction package without a single Republican vote - said
Democrats needed to be prepared to fight similar battles in the 
years ahead.

'We've got to be really clear that this is a struggle, and this is
just not a moment where everybody will see the world the way it
should be seen and come together to solve these problems,' she said
in a recent interview. 'There are powerful forces at work in our
society.'

Mr. Obama also talks about overcoming special interests, but he
proposes to do so by changing the terms of the debate, energizing
disaffected voters and forging a new majority in favor of his
programs. He called climate change 'a perfect example,' because he
would try to persuade Americans to accept some short-term sacrifice
while explaining that their energy costs did not have to increase
nearly as much as utilities would suggest.

But he would start, he said, by trying to turn the discussion about
taxes into an advantage for the Democrats during the general election
campaign this year.

'We have to disaggregate tax policy between the wealthy and the
working class or middle class,' he said. 'We have to be able to say
that we are going to at once raise taxes on some people and lower
taxes on others.'

He added: 'This has been one of the greatest rhetorical sleights of
hand of the Republican Party, and it has been a great weakness of the
Democratic Party.'

The leading Republican candidates have called for the extension of
Mr. Bush's income tax cuts, saying that their scheduled expiration by
the end of 2010 would damage the economy.

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton would extend only the tax cuts for
families making less than $250,000 and then use the revenue from 
the higher taxes on the affluent to help pay for other programs. 
The Democrats note that high-income workers have received far 
larger pay increases than others over the past generation and 
have also had their tax rates cut by a much greater amount.

More so than any other candidate this year, Mr. Obama has surrounded
his campaign's policy team with professional economists (most of
them, like him, still shy of their 50th birthdays), as opposed to
former White House officials or Congress members.

Several Obama proposals have their roots in an academic field known
as behavioral economics, which points out how often people can be
tripped up by complex bureaucracies. Mr. Obama sometimes talks about
an 'iPod government' that can achieve its aims by presenting choices
more simply. Under one proposal, Medicare would be required to
present its prescription drug plans more clearly, to cut down on the
number of people who sign up for a more expensive one than they need.

His interest in 'ease, convenience and usability,' he said, came from
two sources - his years as a community organizer in Chicago, where he
often saw people struggle to understand the choices they had, and his
own experience trying to make sense of his 401(k) plan.

Mr. Obama's father was also an economist, from Kenya, who received
his Ph.D. at Harvard. And Mr. Obama's first job out of college was at
a trade publication for multinational businesses, where he was a
financial writer.

At times, he can sound like an economic analyst, weaving stories that
link seemingly disparate topics. The weak income growth of the last
generation, he said, caused many families to dip into their home
equity, which led to the crisis in the mortgage market. That crisis,
in turn, hurt the balance sheets of American financial firms and
forced them to seek cash infusions from overseas governments, which
has raised some national-security concerns.

'I don't think anybody knew exactly how that would get us in
trouble,' he said, referring to the increase in consumer debt over
the last two decades. 'But it was predictable that it would get us in
trouble.'

This period includes the late 1990s, when wages rose significantly
for workers up and down the income spectrum.

In the interview, Mr. Obama said Mr. Clinton and Robert E. Rubin, the
former Treasury secretary, took courageous steps in the early '90s to
lower the deficit and help make the record-long expansion that ran
from 1991 to early 2001 possible.

He added that 'some of the attacks on the Clinton administration 
from the left,' accusing it of operating as a group of corporate
Democrats, had been unfair.

'They had an economic theory that in part was right - I do think
fiscal discipline is important,' Mr. Obama said. 'What he wasn't able
to do was address the emerging structural imbalance in our economy -
partly due to globalization, partly due to technology and automation
- where increasingly the benefits of economic growth were accruing to
a smaller band of people.'

Mr. Obama said he would push for more investment in emerging
industries, education and worker training -ideas that Mr. Clinton
campaigned on in 1992 but mostly backed away from as president to
repair the fiscal imbalance.

Mrs. Clinton also favors many of these ideas, in a sign that the
Democratic Party has reached something of a consensus on its main
economic policy goals. Indeed, Mr. Obama suggested that his cabinet
would include a good number of Clinton administration alumni.

'I want an Alan Blinder, and I want a Jacob Hacker, and I want a Bob
Rubin, and I want a Robert Reich,' he said, referring to a mix of
centrist and more liberal Democratic economic advisers. 'And I want 
a good robust argument about where we need to go.'

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company