Hillary Attacks Economists

Hillary won't cast her lot with economists

Pressed twice by George Stephanopoulos to name a "credible economist" who thinks the gas tax holiday is a good idea, Clinton can't.

"I’m not going to put my lot in with economists," she said on the "This Week" town hall. Clinton added that the tax holiday would work "if we actually did it right."

More broadly, she repeatedly attacked elite opinion, citing "a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion behind ... policies that haven't worked for the middle class."

Later, she attacked "this mindset where elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans."

“I feel that I am a one-woman economic-development operation,” Mrs. Clinton marveled in a brief interview after a 20-minute flesh-pressing session that followed a rally Thursday night in Terre Haute, Ind.

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Clinton Gas Tax Holiday: Hillary Attacks Economists

The Huffington Post | May 4, 2008 10:05 AM

Sen. Hillary Clinton is sticking to her policy proposal of a gas tax holiday, and the breadth of her now-famous statement that members of Congress are either "with us or against us" has been extended to economists. Today she joined George Stephonopolous for a "This Week" town hall.

When asked to name a credible economist who backed her idea to use a windfall profit tax against oil companies to fund the suspension of a tax on gasoline, Clinton responded:


She continued the line of attack, criticizing more generally "this mindset where elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans."

But at least one member of the town hall was unconvinced. When given the chance to ask a question, an anonymous woman told the candidate:


Clinton's proposal has met widespread resistance from policy analysts of all political persuasions.

“There’s not an expert out there that believes that this is going to work. There’s not an editorial out there that has said this is actually the answer to high gas prices,” Obama said of the gas tax holiday plan. “In fact, my understanding is, today, Sen. Clinton had to send out a surrogate to speak on behalf of this plan, and all she could find was, get this, a lobbyist for Shell Oil to explain how this is going to be good for consumers. It’s a shell game, literally.”

Obama was referencing Steve Elmendorf, a Clinton supporter, who told CNN that Clinton’s gas tax holiday plan was a good proposal. Elmendorf is also a lobbyist from Shell Oil.

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Elmendorf, who turns 47 this Wednesday, has been involved in politics for more than 20 years, after getting his start as a field organizer for Vice President Walter Mondale’s 1984 run for the White House. But he’s still a babe in the woods as far as lobbying goes. After working as a deputy campaign manager to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004, a job he took after managing Gephardt’s campaign, Elmendorf went to work as a lobbyist at Bryan Cave, building a bipartisan lobbying shop with Republican Jack Oliver.

He struck out on his own when Democrats won the House and the Senate in November. After ignoring the party for years, companies were eager to hire Democrats to make inroads with the new majority. Another reason he left, he adds, was that a conflict at Bryan Cave kept him from signing a client he wanted to represent.

Elmendorf Strategies now has three lobbyists — Elmendorf and fellow Democrats Shanti Stanton and Kristi Kennedy — and 14 clients, including blue-chippers like Microsoft, Union Pacific, Northwest Airlines, Shell Oil and the Coalition for Patent Fairness, the client for whom he left Bryan Cave.

Top staffers on Capitol Hill run their own little fiefdoms. Elmendorf found he didn’t have to do much to be busy, as there was always a line of people who wanted him to do something for them, to “suck up,” as he says.

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They include Nobelists Joe Stiglitz, James Heckman, and Daniel Kahneman, as well as a Clinton O.M.B. director, Alice Rivlin, and Robert Shapiro, the chief economic advisor to Clinton's 1992 campaign.

Unclear how many vote in Indiana, though.

UPDATE: I spoke too soon. The list includes nine Indiana University economists, including the chair of the department, Gerhard Glomm.

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Sunday, May 04, 2008

Hillary Clinton Doesn't Listen to Economists

When asked this morning by ABC News' George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists.”

I know several of the economists who have been advising Senator Clinton, so I phoned them right after I heard this. I reached two of them. One hadn’t heard her remark and said he couldn’t believe she’d say it. The other had heard it and shrugged it off as “politics as usual.”

That’s the problem: Politics as usual.

The gas tax holiday is small potatoes relative to everything else. But it’s so economically stupid (it would increase demand for gas and cause prices to rise, eliminating any benefit to consumers while costing the Treasury more than $9 billion, and generate more pollution) and silly (even if she won, HRC won’t be president this summer) as to be worrisome. That HRC now says she doesn’t care that what economists think is even more troubling.

In case you’ve missed it, we now have a president who doesn’t care what most economists think. George W. Bush doesn’t even care what scientists think. He rejects all experts who disagree with his politics. This has led to some extraordinarily stupid policies.

I’m not saying HRC is George Bush. And I'm not suggesting economists have all the answers. But when economists tell a president or a presidential candidate that his or her idea is dumb – and when all respectable economists around America agree that it’s a dumb idea – it’s probably wise for the president or presidential candidate to listen. When the president or candidate doesn’t, and proudly defends the policy by saying she's "not going to put my lot in with economists,” we’ve got a problem, folks.

Even though the summer gas tax holiday is pure hokum, it polls well, which is why HRC and John McCain are pushing it. That Barack Obama is not in favor of it despite its positive polling numbers speaks volumes about the kind of president he’ll be – and the kind of president we’d otherwise get from McCain and HRC.

Haven’t we had enough of politicians who reject facts in favor of short-term poll-driven politics?

At the same time, an overwhelming majority of voters said candidates calling for the suspension of the federal gasoline tax this summer were acting to help themselves politically, rather than to help ordinary Americans. Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, has made the suspension of the gas tax a centerpiece of her campaign in recent days.

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'Our supporters aren't the grubbers'

I also asked Clinton aides about exactly how Hillary distinguishes the "Wall Street money grubbers" she lambasted last night from her many supporters and family members who work on Wall Street, in finance and at hedge funds -- backer Stever Rattner, for instance, and daughter Chelsea Clinton.

"Our supporters aren’t the grubbers," joked Wolfson, before Geoff Garin returned to Clinton's commitment to fairness and to the middle class, and said her Wall Street supporters "share her value of shared prosperity."

Bill Clinton on Gas Taxes: He Raised 'Em in '93, then Opposed a "Vacation" in 2000

May 05, 2008 1:09 PM

In 1993, newly-elected President Bill Clinton raised gas taxes 4.3 cents a gallon.

Bob Dole tried to get that repealed, to no avail, in 1996.

Said then-White House chief of staff Leon Panetta then: "In an election year, it is hard to separate speeches from serious proposals."

In 2000, Clinton was asked at a press conference "in light of the fact that OPEC has decided to increase production, do you see it as a mistake for the Senate to proceed with a bill that would suspend the gas tax? And if it reached your desk, would you veto it?"

His answer -- no. he wasn't sure the savings would be passed on to consumers. (And this is without a windfall profits tax on oil companies, as Sen. Clinton has proposed. Economists forecast that oil companies would pass on a new tax on oil companies to the consumer.)

"I don't expect it to reach my desk because there seems to be bipartisan opposition to it in the House, including among the leadership," he said. "But the problem I have with it, apart from what it might do to the Highway Trust Fund and the spending obligations that have already been incurred by the acts of Congress, the budgets, is that I'm not sure that the savings would be passed along to the consumers in addition to that. So I think there are a lot of questions about it."

The record-setting gas prices right now of course make the situations in 1993, 2000, and 2008 different. But it is interesting to once again compare the record of the administration from which Sen. Clinton claims her experience with her proposals today.

If people are hurting from gas taxes now, after all…

May 6, 2008, 9:19 am

Gas tax hysterics

OK, this has gone overboard.

Hillary Clinton’s proposed gas tax holiday is not, in my view, a good idea. But the furor over what is, when all is said and done, a small and temporary policy proposal is entirely disproportionate. What’s going on?

Part of it, clearly, is the fact that many people in the media really, really want Obama to win and Clinton to lose — read Kurt Andersen — and have seized on the gas tax as their latest proof that she is ee-ee-vil.

But there’s also something going on with economists, a phenomenon I recognize wearing my other hat: the tendency to place excessive weight on issues where professional judgment differs from lay opinion.

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The gas tax holiday is in this category. Economists really do know something about tax incidence that the laity don’t. So when a presidential candidate says something that conflicts with economistic wisdom, it becomes THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE EVER. Except, you know, it isn’t.

There’s a lot of troubling stuff in both Democrats’ proposals. Mandates aside, Obama is seriously low-balling the cost of health care reform, and promising way too much in middle-class tax cuts. Clinton’s numbers don’t quite add up either, though she’s probably closer to the mark — and both Dems are towering figures of responsibility compared with McCain. Amid all this, the gas tax holiday is a real issue, but a small one; don’t let economist’s tendency to overemphasize their areas of expertise distort your view.

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