As most of us understand, "Do I have a job?" is not the only question you might ask about your economic situation. That understanding is what Hillary Clinton is counting on as she delivers her first major economic address Monday, an attempt to articulate a vision that will not only provide a means of understanding the collection of policy changes she'll be advocating in her 2016 campaign for president, but also contrast with the now 17 Republicans who want to face her next fall.
I'm writing this before the full text of Clinton's speech is available, so what I have to go on is only the outline and selections that have been leaked to a couple of reporters (see here and here). But it's clear that Clinton is attempting to expand the economic conversation beyond the two measures that usually dominate the discussion: job growth and GDP growth. "The measure of our economic success," she'll say, "should be how much incomes rise for middle-class households, not an arbitrary growth figure."
So while Clinton is going to offer some proposals like an infrastructure bank meant to create jobs, most of her emphasis is going to be on increasing wages and improving working conditions with things like paid sick leave. To see why this is aimed at the Republican candidates, pay close attention to what they say when they're asked about issues like wage stagnation and inequality. What you almost inevitably get is a brief acknowledgment that these things are indeed a problem, then a quick redirection to the policies they say will accelerate growth and create jobs. The last thing they want is to get into a detailed discussion about wages. If pressed, the best explanation they can come up with for why wages are stagnant, or why inequality has been increasing for many years, is that, like everything else that is not as we would like it to be, it's the government's fault.
That's the nature of the problem they face where their ideological beliefs meet the requirements of a presidential campaign. They don't believe that government can do much affirmatively to improve the economy, so their proposals tend toward "getting government out of the way"-in other words, not doing something new, but stopping something that's already happening. But if you put a Democratic proposal like paid sick leave alongside a Republican proposal like loosening environmental regulations, it's a lot easier to understand how the first is supposed to help workers than how the second would.
So as the discussion on economics shifts, Clinton can advocate for at least some policies that are new and meant to react to the changes that have taken place in the American economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, are unlikely to advocate much beyond what they always advocate. There may be some differences in the details, but its essence will be all too familiar: Cut taxes (particularly on the wealthy), cut regulations on corporations, accelerate the decline in collective bargaining, and wait for our glorious future of prosperity to begin.
But we know how that would turn out, because it's been tried before. You may remember a guy named George W. Bush, who followed this prescription to the letter. When he left office, the American economy had a pathetic 1.2 million more jobs than it had when he was inaugurated eight years before. Even if you want to excuse him for the Great Recession and count his presidency only until the economy began hemorrhaging in January 2008, Bush still saw an increase of only 5.7 million jobs, or around one-quarter of what Bill Clinton managed with all his taxing and spending.
If we did Barack Obama a similar favor by counting only since the depth of the recession he inherited (at the end of 2009), he has overseen the creation of 12 million jobs. If the economy continues on its current pace of adding around 200,000 jobs a month, he'd end up with close to 16 million jobs created since then, which is not too shabby. You may remember that in 2012, Mitt Romney promised that with all his boardroom experience and economic acumen, he could get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent by the end of his first term in 2016; it fell below 6 percent in the fall of 2014 and now stands at 5.3 percent.
But few people look at the Obama presidency and say that it produced spectacular economic results, despite all that job growth. So a Republican who says, "I'll create jobs!" is going to confront an electorate coming to the understanding that job growth isn't enough.
Then there's GDP growth. The most notable Republican proposal so far in this race comes from Jeb Bush, who proclaimed that it's his goal to bring sustained growth of 4 percent, which would truly make him an economic magician; perhaps it's appropriate then that at this point his plan to produce such extraordinary growth seems to consist of little more than waving a magic wand. No president since Lyndon Johnson has averaged 4 percent growth, let alone sustained it over an extended period the way Jeb says he will. Perhaps when he unveils his plan it will so spectacularly creative and clever that Americans will sweep him to the White House on a tide of joyous anticipation for the gifts he will bestow upon us. But I doubt it.
More importantly, GDP growth is just a number; if I ask how my life will be better if you're president and you tell me growth will be higher, you haven't really answered my question. It may be too early to say whether Hillary Clinton's answers are the right ones; she'll need to provide more details on how the things she's proposing would work, not to mention how she'd overcome Republican opposition and get worker-friendly policies passed through Congress. And you can argue that her plan doesn't go nearly far enough. But in the meantime, at least she has an answer.
