Hillary’s Tired Prescription: Infrastructure Spending… Call It a Stimulus!

Today Hillary Clinton offered her argument against Donald Trump on the economy:

Slamming Trump for lacking a substantive strategy on job-creation, Clinton said: “But maybe we shouldn’t expect better from someone whose famous words are: ‘You’re fired.’”

And as Clinton went after Trump’s business record, she mused: “He’s written a lot of books about business. They all seem to end at Chapter 11.”

Earlier this morning, CNN contributor and Trump fan Jeff Lord began his defense of Trump’s business record by citing the Whitewater scandal. Eh. That argument is a little dusty, and there are a lot more recent cases of Hillary cashing in under suspicious circumstances. Besides her numerous lucrative recent speaking gigs and the allegations that the Clinton Foundation amounts to a favor factory for the well-connected and well-financed, there was her $8 million book deal right before entering the Senate. In the words of the New York Times, she “enter[ed] into a multimillion-dollar business transaction with a conglomerate that has a slew of issues coming before Congress.” (Had Clinton been a member of the U.S. House, the book deal would not have been permitted.)

Today on Twitter, Trump threw some of these issues back at her:

He also taped a short video from his desk, declaring, “Obama’s been piling on the debt, and Hillary’s been watching.”

This is in the ballpark of the argument that is probably most effective against Hillary Clinton: she is the status quo. Earlier this month, when asked by Bret Baier how her economic policies would differ from President Obama’s, she immediately praised the president’s record and then eventually called for “a big infrastructure plan… Our roads, our bridges, our tunnels, our ports, our airports, our water systems — we have work to do! It’s good work, that will put people back into the middle class and keep them there!”

You may have noticed that no matter how much the federal government spends on infrastructure, politicians continue to lament “our crumbling roads and bridges.” How easily everyone forgets Obama touting the stimulus as “the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower”! MAP-21, signed into law in 2012, funded $105 billion for roads, bridges, and highways. Here we are, eight years after the stimulus, and Hillary Clinton is making the same promises about infrastructure spending driving the economy to prosperity — forgetting Obama’s sheepish admission, “Shovel-ready was not as… uh…  shovel-ready as we expected.” 

There is no reason to think Hillary Clinton’s economic policies will be all that different from President Obama’s. And if you feel like Obama’s economic policies haven’t helped you and your family, there’s no reason to expect anything different from hers.