Daily Clips: December 8th, 2015
Hillary talks Wall Street: In a New York Times Op-Ed, Hillary Clinton lays out a three point plan that will “rein in Wall Street” (a dubious political proposition, but a great one-liner). She states that “the proper role of Wall Street is to help Main Street grow and prosper.”
How does she plan on achieving this? Firstly, “we need to further rein in major financial institutions.” How would we do this? Among other things, her “plan proposes legislation that would impose a new risk fee on dozens of the biggest banks – those with more than $50 billion in assets – and other systemically important financial institutions to discourage the kind of hazardous behavior that could induce another crisis.” While that all sounds good, we all know there’s no way in hell such legislation would ever pass through Congress.
Secondly, Clinton “would appoint tough, independent regulators and ensure that both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are independently funded — as other critical regulators are now — so that they can do their jobs without political interference.”
Finally, she claims “no one should be too big to jail. I would seek to extend the statute of limitations for major financial crimes to 10 years from five and enhance rewards for whistle-blowers.” (This coming from the woman who said Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing helped terrorists.)
All in all, it’s a pretty generic, bland, and pandering op-ed.
My favorite tweet of the day (so far):
I’ll admit that “5% unemployment and $38 oil will bring about our nastiest politics” wasn’t my expectation in 2011-12.
— Conor Sen (@conorsen) December 7, 2015
The US is a low-tax country: You’d never guess, seeing as Republicans spend 10% of their time complaining about how tax-burdened we are (the other 90% of their time is spent hating on other types of people.) In fact, “we’re an outlier, and you would never know it with anti-tax fervor,” said Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Marr further claims, “the stats show that the U.S. has room to increase taxes to expand the social safety net and handle the aging of the baby-boom generation.”
