Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her first economic policy speech of her 2016 campaign for president at the New School in Manhattan. That drew a sharp response from Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina who is running for the Republican nomination for President.
“I believe we have to build a growth-and-fairness economy. You can’t have one without the other,” Clinton said at the liberal education institution.
In an appeal to the far left in the Democratic Party Clinton attacked corporate profits. “Corporate profits are at near-record highs and Americans are working as hard as ever but paychecks have barely budged in real terms. Families today are stretched in so many directions and so are their budgets,” Clinton said.
She promised as President that she would go beyond the Dodd-Frank law passed in 2010 that introduced greater regulation of the financial industry. She warned that many financial institutions “receive little oversight at all.”
Fiorina responded to Clinton’s speech in a video released on Facebook.
“Hillary Clinton’s speech was a bundle of contradictions, a litany of progressive prescriptions. She talked about going beyond, even further, than Dodd-Frank, and then tried to talk about strengthening the community banking system even though Dodd-Frank has already destroyed hundreds if not thousands of community banks. She talked about going beyond the Affordable Care Act while at the same time lowering health care costs even though it is crystal clear that the Affordable Care Act is raising health care costs and insurance premiums. She talked about the need to simply the tax codes to help small business owners and then proposed a long list of regulations on business. Everything she proposed will make crony capitalism worse, not better, and not once in this speech did she mention the ineptitude, or the corruption, or the size, power and complexity of the federal government. Her speech proved two things today: she is a card-carrying member of the professional political class, and she doesn’t actually understand how the economy works,” Fiorina stated.