A ritual that plays out at 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of every month highlights the urgency of a Hillary Clinton victory in the New York Democratic presidential primary.
At that hour, the U.S. government updates the state of the working and middle classes with its latest measurements of jobs in America, how much they’re paying and how many people are going without.
Shortly afterward, the White House reviews President Obama’s record, sunnily declaring that he has forged a more prosperous union in the country’s recovery from the Great Recession.
Although the President acknowledges that the American people have a ways to go, he vastly understates the depth of their slump.
TRANSCRIPT: HILLARY CLINTON MEETS WITH DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD
The monthly White House celebrations mask the transformation of the United States into a land of shrinking opportunity for all but the wealthiest and the most highly educated.
Despite the addition of an overly impressive-sounding 14 million jobs and a halving of the unemployment rate over the past six years, American businesses are generating far fewer positions than needed.
Too many are part-time or low-wage. Salaries are largely stagnant. At near-record proportions, millions of American adults have simply checked out of the labor force.
In real and painful terms, families have gotten the shaft. Take the typical household — the one whose paychecks are dead center. In 1999, that family pulled in $57,843. By 2014, its income had fallen to $53,657 — a real-dollars drop of $4,186 a year that could have been spent for housing, medical bills, college tuition, retirement saving and you name it.
Still worse, the middle class is steadily withering. Four decades ago, the backbone of the U.S.A. commanded almost two-thirds of the national income. Today, it clings to just 43% while the top tier has roared ahead to claiming almost half, along with wealth that is fully seven times larger than the holdings of the entire middle class.
Sum it up: The global financial meltdown of 2008 supercharged trends that continue to degrade standards of living, worsen income inequality and narrow the paths to better. Meanwhile, despite Obama’s let’s-pretend rituals, Washington has delivered no significant help since the 2009 stimulus, let alone game-changing economic programs.
Blame whomever you like. Blame the President. Blame congressional Republicans. Blame them both. Regardless of where you pin responsibility for Washington’s catastrophic abandonment of the American worker, the nation now reaps the whirlwind in the furies of the 2016 election.
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At this severe breakpoint, the central challenge confronting the next President is clear: She or he must ignite and rebalance the United States economy in favor of the many while also extending an extra helping hand to ease burdens that have grown too heavy for some.
On April 19, New York Democrats will have unusual say over the party’s nominee. They have in Clinton a superprepared warrior realist. They have in opponent Bernie Sanders a fantasist who’s at passionate war with reality. By choosing Clinton, Empire State Dems would powerfully signal that the party has gotten real about achieving long-sought goals.
Clinton is unsparingly clear-eyed about what’s wrong with America while holding firm to what’s right with America.
She fully understands the toll that adverse economic forces have taken on the country.
She is supremely knowledgeable about the powers a President can wield to lift fortunes in need of lifting.
She possesses the strength and the shrewdness to confront the tough politics of advancing an ambitious Democratic agenda in the White House.
Still more, she is a cauldron-tested globalist who had the spine to give Obama a thumbs-up for taking out Osama Bin Laden and who is far the wiser about the use of American power, having served as secretary of state and seen the consequences of the war in Iraq.
These truths about America’s most well-known public figure are long past debating among Democrats, above all in New York, the state Clinton represented in the U.S. Senate.
Here then the moment has arrived to reckon, instead, with truths about Sanders and his programs:
Subjected to meaningful scrutiny for the first time, the senator from Vermont proved utterly unprepared for the Oval Office while confirming that the central thrusts of his campaign are politically impossible.
Which, paradoxically, is good news, because some of the most prominent Sanderisms would likely wreak epic economic damage.
TRANSCRIPT: BERNIE SANDERS MEETS WITH DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD
As a basic premise, Sanders calls for enormously expanding the federal government’s role in American life, supported by equally huge tax increases — most of them falling on the wealthy but also hammering average middle-income earners to the tune of $4,700 a year.
On that score, he assumes that wage earners would happily shell out big bucks year after year because, trust him, health care would be free.
And trust him, raising government spending by 40%, perhaps by more than 50%, would be a boon to America — never mind that the prospect of smothering the economy frightens even left-leaning experts.
And trust him, the government would have enough money to provide free public college education to all — never mind that credible studies say he would fall short of financing all of his ideas by more than $3 trillion over 10 years.
And trust him, he would arrive in Washington as leader of a “revolution” powerful enough to bulldoze congressional Republicans — even in a time-wasting drive to replace the Obamacare they hate with a still more hated full government takeover of health insurance.
And trust him, he would end income inequality by launching an all-out assault on America’s largest banks — never credibly explaining how forcibly breaking up the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Citibank would add a dime to a single paycheck.
As would happen with any ideological phenomenon, close inspection of Sanders’ thinking clarifies that trust is misplaced. So it was when he appeared before the Daily News Editorial Board.
Although Sanders has vowed a shock-and-awe bank-busting campaign that would risk global financial chaos, he was at a loss to show how he would execute the assault or to cite legal authority for such sweeping and unprecedented exercise of presidential power.
Although Sanders has repeatedly said, “It is an outrage that not one major Wall Street executive has gone to jail for causing the near collapse of the economy,” he was also at a loss to say what specific criminal statute the execs might have broken.
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Similarly at sea on foreign affairs, Sanders asserted that Israel had killed 10,000 civilian Palestinians in a 2014 military operation — more than five times the true number. Still more, he answered: “Actually I haven’t thought about it a whole lot,” when asked where a President Sanders would imprison or interrogate a captured ISIS terrorist.
Finally, Sanders’ ideological purity has found a boundary in political convenience. He roundly and repeatedly denounces corporate America for destroying the fabric of America, yet, representing a Second Amendment-friendly state, he voted to grant the gun industry near total immunity from lawsuits.
In endorsing Clinton in the coming primary, the Daily News looked to lessons learned from its “Fight for Fair Pay” campaign, including the successful push in 2014 to secure raises for 12,000 minimum-wage workers at New York-area airports.
Because the need was indisputable and because union leadership had set a goal that was both ambitious and politically achievable, The News’ focus helped salaries rise from $8 an hour to $10.10 and, unknown at the time, the movement for Gov. Cuomo’s eventual $15-an-hour target had begun.
The necessary elements were justice, political smarts and pragmatism — the qualities that shine the brighter in Clinton’s economic agenda.
As a first priority, she looks to boost growth so that businesses need more workers and thus must hike salaries to attract them. She would stimulate the economy with major investments in roads, bridges and other infrastructure, as well as in scientific and medical research in critical areas like neuroscience. One such plan would devote $2 billion annually to seeking techniques to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s disease.
As a second priority, she would use substantial tax hikes on the wealthy and breaks for the middle class both to tilt the scales away from the rich and to jump-start the economy by giving many others more money to spend. Example: Clinton would set a hard floor so that million-dollar earners have to fully pay up, no more wriggling out.
Each of her plans is calibrated to achieve a specific result.
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Based on need, Clinton would enable every student to graduate debt-free from public higher education, with the rich paying their own way and those further down the ladder receiving greater and greater support. Importantly, as structured there would be no handouts to the undeserving.
To maintain investment in America, big businesses would face heavy penalties for moving money abroad to avoid corporate taxes while businesses that invest here would enjoy benefits.
To stem too-big-to-fail financial danger, Clinton would strengthen regulations written after the 2008 crash by imposing escalating fees on banks and other players whose size and structure put the public at risk.
Clinton’s proposals are shaped for the world in which we live, not the world in which we might wish to live. By any stretch of the imagination — except that of Sanders — they stand as the highflying progressive wish list of a results-driven candidate.
Head to head exclusively on those terms — which are the fundamental terms of their debate — the former First Lady, senator and secretary of state promises to be a true Democratic champion.
For all these reasons, the Daily News strongly endorses Hillary Clinton in the April 19 New York Democratic primary.
