“Clinton-Kaine just don’t get it. They, along with the Obama administration, have created all of the poverty they proclaim they want to fight,” Peter Navarro, an economic policy advisor to Donald Trump, tells Breitbart News.
Navarro was responding to Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D-VA) “social justice war on poverty” speech delivered in Detroit on Tuesday.
“That poverty has now crept up to the middle class and down to the Black and Latino communities in our battered inner cities,” the best-selling author with a Phd. in economics from Harvard says.
Fighting poverty is a growth strategy. It’s a competitive strategy, but it’s also a moral responsibility and it’s going to be a defining mission of a Clinton-Kaine administration.
But Navarro, a professor of economics at the University of California at Irvine, tells Breitbart News, “The Democrats have been fighting a losing war on poverty since the days of Lyndon Johnson and the only thing they have to show for it is a weak economy, a huge government debt, and despair in the constituencies that for some inexplicable reason keep putting them back into office.”
In his speech, Kaine outlined what he called “the three pillars” of the Clinton-Kaine social justice war on poverty, all of which are heavy on government spending, and redistribution of wealth, which the Detroit Free Press reported include:
(1) Raising incomes for families, which entails raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, investing in poverty-stricken communities with things like infrastructure improvement projects, and increasing tax credits for child care.
(2) Making sure communities and homes are safe by fighting things like housing discrimination and predatory lending; ensuring the water and air in places like Flint are safe to consume; and enacting common sense gun control measures like universal background checks.
(3) And improving education by expanding early childhood development and Head Start programs.
“This is just misplaced 1960s looking into the rear view mirror,” Navarro notes.
Kaine’s proposals pushed the Clinton-Kaine campaign farther to the left on social justice-driven economic policies than Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket has previously proposed in her own public statements.
Oddly, the Clinton-Kaine campaign chose Kaine at the bottom of the ticket to set forth these new proposals on a day that Clinton herself was off the campaign trail and preparing for Wednesday night’s third and final debate with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“Everything about this is wrong,” Navarro says of Kaine’s assertion that the array of expanded Great Society style government spending programs would be a “defining mission” of a Clinton-Kaine administration.
“I would think the defining mission of the Clinton Kaine campaign would be to double the GDP growth rate, to create tens of millions of new jobs and trillions of dollars of new income for all the people of America. That’s exactly what the Trump plan does,” he adds.
“It’s curious that Kaine has no understanding that the Clinton-Kaine plan to raise taxes, increase regulations, put thousands of coal miners under the poverty line, and continue to ship thousands of manufacturing jobs overseas would increase poverty,” Navarro says.
Navarro says that “As far as a defining mission, national secruity/the war on terror and economic growth are the twin pillars of the responsibilities of any nation.”
“That should be the mission of the Clinton-Kaine campaign. It is the mission of the Trump campaign,” he adds.
One of the myriad government-focused policy proposals advanced by Kaine in his Tuesday speech is illustrative of how he has pushed the Clinton-Kaine agenda further to the left, with Hillary Clinton’s apparent agreement.
On the issue of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which Kaine says the Clinton-Kaine team now supports and will champion, in April Politifact ruled in it’s “Truth-O-Meter” that when “Sanders said, “When this campaign began, I said that we’ve got to end the starvation minimum wage of $7.25, raise it to $15. Secretary Clinton said let’s raise it to $12,” that “We rate his claim Mostly True.”
Later that month, when asked by CNN’s Wolf Blizter, moderating a Democratic presidential candidate debate,“If a Democratic Congress put a $15 minimum wage bill on your desk, would you sign it?” Clinton said “Well, of course I would.”
Kaine’s speech now moves the Clinton-Kaine campaign from a position of passive acceptance of a progressive/labor union goal of a $15 an hour minimum wage to active leadership in achieving that goal as part of its “defining mission.”
Kaine also moved the Clinton campaign to the left on health care, where the public by almost a two to one margin has declared Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, to be a failure.
One day before the White House signaled its support for a public option on Wednesday, an even more intrusive invasion of government into the delivery of health care than the Affordable Care Act, Kaine said in his Detroit speech, “We’ve got to create a public option for health care so that we can continue to drive down health care prices.”
Previously, Politifact reported that Clinton’s position on a public option was more passive, citing her campaign website, which stated her health care plan to be:
Defend and expand the Affordable Care Act, which covers 20 million people. Hillary will stand up to Republican-led attacks on this landmark law—and build on its success to bring the promise of affordable health care to more people and make a “public option” possible. She will also support letting people over 55 years old buy into Medicare.
Clinton previously wanted to “make a ‘public option’ possible.” After Kaine’s speech, the Clinton-Kaine position is now “to create a public option for health care.”
You can watch Kaine’s entire 53 minute speech here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON3YGYxdiPw
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