In two major speeches this week, one at the annual conference of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy group, and the other at The New College in New York City, Hillary Clinton laid out her clearest vision yet on her economic agenda for 2016 and took aim at recent comments by GOP candidate Donald Trump in which he labeled Mexican immigrants “rapists” and accused them of “bringing drugs” into the country.
Speaking at NCLR’s annual conference in Kansas City, Clinton said that all the Republican candidates were virtually indistinguishable from one another, noting that “the sad truth is even if some of the other candidates now condemn those words if you look at many of their policies, it’s hard to tell the difference.”
Along with Clinton, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, both competing with Clinton for the Democratic nomination, also addressed the crowd.
In New York, Clinton offered her most detailed proposals on the economy to date, highlighting wage stagnation and a lack of wage growth as the most pressing economic issue facing Americans. The former Secretary of State, Senator from New York and First Lady also proposed increasing the minimum wage and corporate profit sharing with employees, two pieces of the rising political left’s economic must have-list going into 2016.
In her speech, Clinton said that “the measure of our success must be how much incomes rise for hard-working families, not just for successful CEOs and money managers and not just some arbitrary growth target untethered from people’s lives and livelihoods.”
In proposing the corporate profit sharing proposal, Clinton cited record profits by some of Wall Street’s biggest banks and noted that “studies show profit-sharing that gives everyone a stake in a company’s success can boost productivity and put money directly into employees’ pockets.”
While Clinton’s economic speech did not dive into the specifics of each policy proposal, it did provide a sharp contract to the rhetoric coming from the GOP candidates in the 2016 field. Clinton dismissed many economic proposals on the Republican side particularly Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s tax plan as a “budget-busting giveaway.”
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