After Hillary Clinton gave her big anti-free-trade speech in Michigan, I wondered what the Clinton-family dinner conversation would be like that night.
Hillary: “Hey honey, I went in front of a crowd today and turned my back on everything you believe in on trade.”
Did Bill say, “That’s okay Sweets. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get us back in the White House”?
Or did he say, “You said what? What on earth were you thinking? Free trade is bringing cheaper goods and services to the American people, in particular to lower-income families. I thought you understood that”?
After all, if the 42nd president of the United States was anything, he was as close to a free-trader as it gets. Granted “free trade” as understood by Bill Clinton and Congress is more akin to “managed trade” but it still has the benefit of lifting many restrictions, including the ones against foreign imports.
But as I noted last week, Hillary Clinton has become so awful on trade that she is now indistinguishable from Donald Trump.
I also wonder how the couple gets around the fact that Bill Clinton, who spends a fair amount of his time on the campaign trail touting his own presidential record, was — all things considered — a radically different Democrat than his wife. As Michael Tanner reminded us in January:
Bill Clinton, after all, was a “New Democrat,” the president who declared that “the era of big government is over.” Hillary is an unapologetic defender of ever bigger government. In that same State of the Union address where he announced the demise of big government, Bill went on to say that he had “worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic Government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means.” If Hillary said anything even close to that, her head would explode . . .
Bill — pushed, of course, by Republicans in Congress — brought us welfare reform. Hillary seeks to expand the American welfare state.
Bill presided over the first and only balanced budgets since the Nixon administration. Federal spending averaged just 19.2 percent of GDP during the Clinton presidency and bottomed out at just 17.6 percent, the lowest level since 1966. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has already called for more than $1.1 trillion in new spending over the next ten years. And while Bill seriously explored entitlement reform, even considering the possibility of allowing younger workers to invest privately a small portion of their Social Security taxes, Hillary not only opposes any efforts to “cut or privatize the program,” she actually wants to expand it to offer new and additional benefits.
Is it just me, or wouldn’t you too like to listen in on those family dinners? (That’s assuming that either Clinton ever believed in anything they have ever said on the subject of trade.)
On that note, I was recently reading about what I am sure led to another set of awkward dinner conversations. As you may know Heather Bresch, the head of Mylan, the company accused of hiking the price of the EpiPen, is also the daughter of a Democratic U.S. senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin. I can imagine that the current drama makes for interesting family dynamic. But it’s not the first time.
Like most people who refuse to understand the reasons behind corporate inversions, Manchin has always been a big crusader against what President Obama called an “unpatriotic loophole.” But in 2014, Mylan decided to invert and move its headquarters to the Netherlands. It’s not a surprise that a company doing so much business abroad would decide to invert to avoid the punishing effects of our awful corporate-income-tax system. The choice of the Netherlands, which has one of the purest territorial corporate-tax systems in the world, also makes a lot of sense.
Bresch’s father didn’t take the news well. In a piece over at National Journal, Manchin explained that “what his daughter did should be illegal.”
And you thought your family dinners could be awkward.