Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has named Heather Boushey, the radical economist who claims “Fixing feminism means thinking about the economy,” to be chief economist of her presidential transition team.
Clinton named her entire transition team, which includes the ultra-left dream team of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA); consumer advocate Rohit Chopra; and Trans-Pacific Partnership advocate, and former Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar.
Adding Boushey to the “team” completes Clinton’s lunge to the extreme left of the economic pond, since the chief transition economist is almost always named chair of Council of Economic Advisors in a new administration.
Boushey is a veteran of the far-left Center for American Progress, a think tank associated with George Soros and Clinton “fixer” John Podesta.
Boushey is currently the executive director and chief economist of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and just published Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict. Boushey claims her “central insight” is that American institutions do not support a proper balance between work and family life, and that the burdens fall disproportionately upon women.
Hillary’s new economic guru would go far beyond the current campaign policy proposals that Clinton herself had rolled-out in May. Boushey proposes a massive set of federal and state interventions into the economy to “create balance” by mandating national paid sick leave, paid parental leave, subsidized child care, and paid care for the elderly to relieve care burdens on grown children.
Breitbart News reported in early August that Hillary Clinton originally wanted to maintain Barack Obama’s growth-killing economic policies and spending, but she was pushed even further to the left by the primary challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). To try to bring the “Berners” into her campaign, Clinton promised to launch big infrastructure spending, provide mass college subsidies, nationalize preschool child care, and go all-in for spending on “sustainable energy.”
According to the independent Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Clinton’s budget plan would grow the U.S. deficit $9.9 trillion in the next decade, despite raising the top personal income tax bracket to 49.3 percent and surtaxing banks by $80 billion.
Although Boushey’s book is well written and frames her policies as pro-worker and common sense, her radical expansion of entitlement spending would cost at least $1.5 trillion over the decade, and significantly drive up the cost of labor and insurance.
According to according Tyler Cowen of the Foundation for Economic Education:
Mandatory benefits represent a real added cost, evaluated anew, and employers will respond accordingly. They will cut the paid dollar wage, cut other job benefits, require more hard work, automate more, or cut back on plans for growing the business. The downward-sloping demand curve is the best established empirical regularity in all of economics, and in this context that means some laborers — maybe most laborers — will pay a price for their new benefits, one way or another.
Boushey does not make any calculations regarding the expense of her proposed mandatory benefits, but simply dismisses financial concerns on page 1 of Finding Time, saying the costs would be “very small.” Boushey essentially wants to found a leftist school of “supply-side economics” that postulates the greater the entitlement spending, the greater amount of economic growth.
Cowen comments that Finding Time doesn’t find time to consider the negative consequences from policies that bloat the deficit and reduce employment due to higher labor costs.
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