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Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Hillary’s baby bond doesn’t poll out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Queen of the Welfare State, demonstrating that she’s her husband’s wife, rolls with the polls, revealing that the proposal she first announced at a gathering of the Congressional Black Caucus is now toast.
No longer, says Hillary, is she pushing a proposal to force taxpayers to award $5,000 to every child born in America, something she suggested last month. Instead she offers a new entitlement — one that would cost $20-$25 billion a year — to give every citizen a $1,000 annual match for a new 401(k) retirement account. She’d pay for it by taxing the dead — or at least those who inherit estates valued at more than $7 million per couple. “They will begin to bring down this inequality that is eating away at our social contract,” she said of the accounts at a campaign stop in Iowa.
For liberal Democrats, it’s ideal: A way to extract wealth from “the rich” and the dead for an entitlement that will be popular with the masses of voters. Hillary says her proposal would extract enough money from a single estate to give $1,000 gifts to 5,000 individuals. Lose one vote, get 5,000. We are perilously close in this country to a system where half pay on April 15th and and the other half take by the ballot box.
Referring to the govern-by-polls Clinton hallmark, Democratic rival John Edwards’ spokesman, Chris Kofinis, said that “apparently new polling data seems to have pressured the Clinton campaign to throw out the baby bond with the bathwater.” But wait. Any day now, the populist Edwards is likely to pick it up.
The taxpayer gifts would not be seen as replacing any part of the Social Security now or in the future, she said. She’ll have a solution to that, too, though likely not until she’s into her second term.
