Wow. What a difference! This last weekend Hillary had her turn with the Daily News editorial board and it's like night and day. Jonathan Capehart.
"One word would describe Hillary Clinton’s Saturday sit-down with the New York Daily News editorial board: Boring! And that’s a good thing."
"The 80-minute wonkfest with the two-term former senator from the Empire State was notably different from the editorial board meeting with Sen. Bernie Sanders a week earlier. That gathering was gasp-worthy for the Vermont Independent’s seeming inability to talk beyond his stump speech. Clinton had the opposite issue. She could talk — and talk and talk — about anything in thoughtful paragraphs stuffed with details."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/04/11/what-hillary-clinton-gets-right-by-being-boring/
Yes, she sounds like someone who you can actually imagine being President. Compare the two of them on 'free college.'
"One of the pillars of Sanders’s successful challenge to Clinton is his call for free tuition at public colleges and universities. During his interview, he mentioned it only twice. The most prominent mention came when he talked about how his called-for political revolution would lead to change on Capitol Hill."
"Sanders: For example, as you know, I’ve talked about the need to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. Do I believe we can deliver on that? Absolutely, because I believe that millions of young people and their parents understand that that’s what we should be doing right now. And I think if Republicans or some Democrats want to vote against it, they will pay a very heavy political price."
"My former colleagues should have pushed Sanders on the mechanics of providing such a benefit. Maybe they didn’t because they were acquainted with his six-point plan to make college tuition free and opted to spend the time on K-12 education funding instead. Perhaps this might explain why they posed the details question to Clinton. Her plan is largely seen as a reaction to Sanders’s popular stance and it isn’t free. But as you will see by her lengthy answer, Clinton isn’t ceding any ground to Sanders on college affordability."
Daily News: Get excited about your college plan now.
Clinton: Yeah, I’m very excited about my college plan.
Daily News: Make me understand it…..
Clinton: …The best way to do that is to ask, “Okay, what’s the problem?” Here’s the problem. States have been disinvesting in higher education now for 20 years but at an accelerating pace for 10 years. So that the flagship higher education systems in California, in New York, in Michigan, other places have been under increasing pressure because states have diverted money to other purposes. Building prisons has taken a lot of state dollars, and I think we should end building any more prisons. I think we need to be focused on moving people out of prison and diverting them in the first place. But we have to figure out how we get states, once again, to invest, because tuition has gone up 42% in the last 10 years. Nothing else has gone up that fast.
"So you’re putting families and young people in an increasingly untenable position. So I have what I call the New College Compact. And it takes federal dollars to use basically as the incentive for states to join with the federal government in providing debt-free tuition for middle-class, working and poor families. I will not make it free the way my opponent, Sen. Sanders, has offered, for two big reasons."
"First, I want not only to incentivize states to reinvest in higher education. I want to incentivize colleges and universities to take a hard look at their costs, because I do think that there needs to be a rigorous analysis. You know, one of the complaints that I think students rightly make is every student pays for athletic facilities. It may be required to buy tickets that they will never use. We need to take a hard look at what’s going into the base for the tuition that the average student has to pay. So if you say it’s free, I mean that’s like, take the pressure off, okay?"
Daily News: Describe the flow of the money now from Washington to New York, for instance.
Clinton: Okay, let me finish. I get excited. Okay, so you’ve got the states, you’ve got the institutions and you’ve got the families, and then students who want to take advantage of debt-free tuition have to agree to work 10 hours a week. It’s work-study at the college or university, because a couple of public institutions — Arizona State University being a prime example — have lowered their costs by using students for a lot of the work. Yes, it’s free. It’s in effect in exchange for lower tuition. So I want that to be part of the deal.
"So the federal government would hold out this promise. And I think states with Democratic governors like New York or California would accept it."
Daily News: But the promise is what? That federal government would give what?
Clinton: Would ensure that as students are accepted into public colleges and universities, they would submit an application that included their family income and resources, and below a certain level, they would be told, “Okay, you can afford this much, x amount, to pay for your tuition, but you can’t afford any more than that. We will make up the difference.” And some people will be told, “You can’t afford any of it, so we will pay. So you do not have to borrow any money whatsoever to go to school.”
"But it would be better, it would work better, if the states were also reinvesting. And so part of the compact is to encourage the states to do that by saying, “We got a great deal for your students, but we’re going to request that you put more money in. And by the way, colleges and universities, I don’t see how you’re going to tell your students they can’t be eligible but we want you to engage in the hard analysis of what you are charging your students.”
Daily News: Okay, well, right now, you go through the financial aid process and…
Clinton: Right, and it’s too long, and too messy, and yeah.
Daily News: And students and families fill out a form, and then they’re told what they can afford.
Clinton: Yeah, but here’s the difference, Arthur. They are told, “You are eligible for this kind of aid.” The aid comes with usually an interest rate that is often above market level, number one. The aid is very often not in any way going to help them if they can afford through the aid to have tuition, but they get no help on the expense side. So I am also offering help on the expense side for young people who need it.
"So we’ve got this perfect storm. They go through this long, burdensome process, and they often end up being told, “Well, you can borrow x amount at this rate.” They borrow x amount at this rate, but there’s no guarantee that the rate stays the same. We are eliminating that."
Daily News: But after you’ve decided for an individual student, this is what this student or the student’s family should be able to afford, will the government be making a grant on top of that? It’s not a loan.
Clinton: It’s not a loan.
Daily News: So if somebody says, “You can afford $,1000 and tuition is $4,000…”
Clinton: We pay three.
Daily News: You pay three.
"One word would describe Hillary Clinton’s Saturday sit-down with the New York Daily News editorial board: Boring! And that’s a good thing."
"The 80-minute wonkfest with the two-term former senator from the Empire State was notably different from the editorial board meeting with Sen. Bernie Sanders a week earlier. That gathering was gasp-worthy for the Vermont Independent’s seeming inability to talk beyond his stump speech. Clinton had the opposite issue. She could talk — and talk and talk — about anything in thoughtful paragraphs stuffed with details."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/04/11/what-hillary-clinton-gets-right-by-being-boring/
Yes, she sounds like someone who you can actually imagine being President. Compare the two of them on 'free college.'
"One of the pillars of Sanders’s successful challenge to Clinton is his call for free tuition at public colleges and universities. During his interview, he mentioned it only twice. The most prominent mention came when he talked about how his called-for political revolution would lead to change on Capitol Hill."
"Sanders: For example, as you know, I’ve talked about the need to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. Do I believe we can deliver on that? Absolutely, because I believe that millions of young people and their parents understand that that’s what we should be doing right now. And I think if Republicans or some Democrats want to vote against it, they will pay a very heavy political price."
"My former colleagues should have pushed Sanders on the mechanics of providing such a benefit. Maybe they didn’t because they were acquainted with his six-point plan to make college tuition free and opted to spend the time on K-12 education funding instead. Perhaps this might explain why they posed the details question to Clinton. Her plan is largely seen as a reaction to Sanders’s popular stance and it isn’t free. But as you will see by her lengthy answer, Clinton isn’t ceding any ground to Sanders on college affordability."
Daily News: Get excited about your college plan now.
Clinton: Yeah, I’m very excited about my college plan.
Daily News: Make me understand it…..
Clinton: …The best way to do that is to ask, “Okay, what’s the problem?” Here’s the problem. States have been disinvesting in higher education now for 20 years but at an accelerating pace for 10 years. So that the flagship higher education systems in California, in New York, in Michigan, other places have been under increasing pressure because states have diverted money to other purposes. Building prisons has taken a lot of state dollars, and I think we should end building any more prisons. I think we need to be focused on moving people out of prison and diverting them in the first place. But we have to figure out how we get states, once again, to invest, because tuition has gone up 42% in the last 10 years. Nothing else has gone up that fast.
"So you’re putting families and young people in an increasingly untenable position. So I have what I call the New College Compact. And it takes federal dollars to use basically as the incentive for states to join with the federal government in providing debt-free tuition for middle-class, working and poor families. I will not make it free the way my opponent, Sen. Sanders, has offered, for two big reasons."
"First, I want not only to incentivize states to reinvest in higher education. I want to incentivize colleges and universities to take a hard look at their costs, because I do think that there needs to be a rigorous analysis. You know, one of the complaints that I think students rightly make is every student pays for athletic facilities. It may be required to buy tickets that they will never use. We need to take a hard look at what’s going into the base for the tuition that the average student has to pay. So if you say it’s free, I mean that’s like, take the pressure off, okay?"
Daily News: Describe the flow of the money now from Washington to New York, for instance.
Clinton: Okay, let me finish. I get excited. Okay, so you’ve got the states, you’ve got the institutions and you’ve got the families, and then students who want to take advantage of debt-free tuition have to agree to work 10 hours a week. It’s work-study at the college or university, because a couple of public institutions — Arizona State University being a prime example — have lowered their costs by using students for a lot of the work. Yes, it’s free. It’s in effect in exchange for lower tuition. So I want that to be part of the deal.
"So the federal government would hold out this promise. And I think states with Democratic governors like New York or California would accept it."
Daily News: But the promise is what? That federal government would give what?
Clinton: Would ensure that as students are accepted into public colleges and universities, they would submit an application that included their family income and resources, and below a certain level, they would be told, “Okay, you can afford this much, x amount, to pay for your tuition, but you can’t afford any more than that. We will make up the difference.” And some people will be told, “You can’t afford any of it, so we will pay. So you do not have to borrow any money whatsoever to go to school.”
"But it would be better, it would work better, if the states were also reinvesting. And so part of the compact is to encourage the states to do that by saying, “We got a great deal for your students, but we’re going to request that you put more money in. And by the way, colleges and universities, I don’t see how you’re going to tell your students they can’t be eligible but we want you to engage in the hard analysis of what you are charging your students.”
Daily News: Okay, well, right now, you go through the financial aid process and…
Clinton: Right, and it’s too long, and too messy, and yeah.
Daily News: And students and families fill out a form, and then they’re told what they can afford.
Clinton: Yeah, but here’s the difference, Arthur. They are told, “You are eligible for this kind of aid.” The aid comes with usually an interest rate that is often above market level, number one. The aid is very often not in any way going to help them if they can afford through the aid to have tuition, but they get no help on the expense side. So I am also offering help on the expense side for young people who need it.
"So we’ve got this perfect storm. They go through this long, burdensome process, and they often end up being told, “Well, you can borrow x amount at this rate.” They borrow x amount at this rate, but there’s no guarantee that the rate stays the same. We are eliminating that."
Daily News: But after you’ve decided for an individual student, this is what this student or the student’s family should be able to afford, will the government be making a grant on top of that? It’s not a loan.
Clinton: It’s not a loan.
Daily News: So if somebody says, “You can afford $,1000 and tuition is $4,000…”
Clinton: We pay three.
Daily News: You pay three.
Again: Bernie's free college plan is not actually free. Matt Yglesias said that Bernie's approach won him over. As a political matter, it's true 'free college' is very simple to understand.
But I thought the Democratic party was not about being simplistic. His plan is not free college so it's misleading advertising.
She also touches on something very important here:
"Now the other thing I want to quickly say because I also feel strongly about this. We do need to try to get the cost of community college as close to free as possible. And the President made a proposal about that. I think he’s on the right track on that, because a lot of young people, especially starting in high school, go to community college programs and actually acquire college credits as well as credentials. Maybe it’s a credential as a machinist or maybe it’s college credits so you can start as a junior and save the money that you would have otherwise spent in your freshman or sophomore years."
"So I am determined that we’re going to do more with community college, more with technical institutions, because we have to once again send a very strong message that going to college is not the only way to get a good middle-class life. We have about 1.2 million jobs in this country that are going unfilled for machinists and welders and tool and dye makers and computer coders and a lot of things that don’t require a four-year college degree but do require skills. So we have to look at the total picture about how we make college affordable, how we make community college readily available starting in high school, how we produce more credentialed workers and then get them out into the workforce."
This is a very important point that Krugman has been making for a long time. Not everything is about more college. There are plenty of good paying jobs out there now that don't require a college education-so why waste the time and money on it?
Here, now is Hillary on Bernie's big issue: breaking up the banks.
Clinton: Well, I have been a strong supporter of Dodd-Frank because it is the most consequential financial reforms since the Great Depression. And I have said many times in debates and in other settings, there is authority in Dodd-Frank to break up banks that pose a grave threat to financial stability.
There are two approaches. There’s Section 121, Section 165, and both of them can be used by regulators to either require a bank to sell off businesses, lines of businesses or assets, because of the finding that is made by two-thirds of the financial regulators that the institution poses a grave threat, or if the Fed and the FDIC conclude that the institutions’ living will resolution is inadequate and is not going to get any better, there can also be requirements that they do so."
My longtime-and highly valued reader-Greg made this comment the other day.
"I am so tired of hearing all the "bring back Glass Steagall" talk. Glass Steagall was for an environment decades old. Today requires a different approach. Breaking up banks is a joke. Its not the size of individual banks its the overall size of the banking system that matters and that aint shrinking."
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2016/04/is-jeff-weaver-behind-bernie-campaign.html?showComment=1460201323857#c1114834320975039774
Greg and I have differed somewhat on Bernie. I've been a lot more partisan in being a supporter of Hillary's and being very skeptical of Bernie since the earliest days. There's no question I've been a Bernie basher. It's just how I feel.
But Greg is not what we call on Twitter a 'Berner' either. He does see the short comings of Bernie. I have to say that, here, Bernie is himself to blame. He has made 'breaking up the big banks' a rallying cry.
Greg wants more nuance and wonkery, and I think you have to agree that Hillary is providing it here.
I like what Hillary says here too. It shows her governing philosophy very well:
Daily News: Should some of those culprits have been prosecuted, and in prison, successfully? Does that rankle you?
Clinton: Well, it rankles me that I don’t believe we had sufficient laws, sufficient prosecutorial resources to really go after what could have been not just dangerous, unethical behavior but perhaps illegal behavior. I’ve talked with some of the people responsible for trying to determine whether there could be cases brought. And they were totally outresourced.
"We haven’t adequately resourced the regulators — SEC, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, FDIC — and we have not sufficiently resourced the Justice Department and U.S. attorneys to have the expertise and the ability to go after anything they sought."
Daily News: There’s two slightly different questions. One is, was it a problem of law or was it a problem of prosecutors not being sufficiently resourced?
Clinton: The prosecutors tell me it was the problem of the law. Other analysts, as you well know, have said that there could have been more vigorous efforts that might have led to prosecutions. Now there were cases brought in some of the mortgage companies. There’s also a problem with the statute of limitations, because these are difficult cases to bring. They take a long time. I think we should certainly extend the statute of limitations.
"So I’m not going to second-judge people who I believe were acting in good faith, because I think they were — U.S. attorneys, Department of Justice prosecutors. But they concluded that they could not make cases. So I think we have to have a very robust analysis of what were the real reasons they couldn’t make cases. Are the laws insufficient? Therefore how do we try to make them tougher as a deterrent and make it clear to people in the financial services industry that there’s a new sheriff in town so that there will be additional legal requirements and we will resource better."
"So I am determined that we’re going to do more with community college, more with technical institutions, because we have to once again send a very strong message that going to college is not the only way to get a good middle-class life. We have about 1.2 million jobs in this country that are going unfilled for machinists and welders and tool and dye makers and computer coders and a lot of things that don’t require a four-year college degree but do require skills. So we have to look at the total picture about how we make college affordable, how we make community college readily available starting in high school, how we produce more credentialed workers and then get them out into the workforce."
This is a very important point that Krugman has been making for a long time. Not everything is about more college. There are plenty of good paying jobs out there now that don't require a college education-so why waste the time and money on it?
Here, now is Hillary on Bernie's big issue: breaking up the banks.
Clinton: Well, I have been a strong supporter of Dodd-Frank because it is the most consequential financial reforms since the Great Depression. And I have said many times in debates and in other settings, there is authority in Dodd-Frank to break up banks that pose a grave threat to financial stability.
There are two approaches. There’s Section 121, Section 165, and both of them can be used by regulators to either require a bank to sell off businesses, lines of businesses or assets, because of the finding that is made by two-thirds of the financial regulators that the institution poses a grave threat, or if the Fed and the FDIC conclude that the institutions’ living will resolution is inadequate and is not going to get any better, there can also be requirements that they do so."
My longtime-and highly valued reader-Greg made this comment the other day.
"I am so tired of hearing all the "bring back Glass Steagall" talk. Glass Steagall was for an environment decades old. Today requires a different approach. Breaking up banks is a joke. Its not the size of individual banks its the overall size of the banking system that matters and that aint shrinking."
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2016/04/is-jeff-weaver-behind-bernie-campaign.html?showComment=1460201323857#c1114834320975039774
Greg and I have differed somewhat on Bernie. I've been a lot more partisan in being a supporter of Hillary's and being very skeptical of Bernie since the earliest days. There's no question I've been a Bernie basher. It's just how I feel.
But Greg is not what we call on Twitter a 'Berner' either. He does see the short comings of Bernie. I have to say that, here, Bernie is himself to blame. He has made 'breaking up the big banks' a rallying cry.
Greg wants more nuance and wonkery, and I think you have to agree that Hillary is providing it here.
I like what Hillary says here too. It shows her governing philosophy very well:
Daily News: Should some of those culprits have been prosecuted, and in prison, successfully? Does that rankle you?
Clinton: Well, it rankles me that I don’t believe we had sufficient laws, sufficient prosecutorial resources to really go after what could have been not just dangerous, unethical behavior but perhaps illegal behavior. I’ve talked with some of the people responsible for trying to determine whether there could be cases brought. And they were totally outresourced.
"We haven’t adequately resourced the regulators — SEC, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, FDIC — and we have not sufficiently resourced the Justice Department and U.S. attorneys to have the expertise and the ability to go after anything they sought."
Daily News: There’s two slightly different questions. One is, was it a problem of law or was it a problem of prosecutors not being sufficiently resourced?
Clinton: The prosecutors tell me it was the problem of the law. Other analysts, as you well know, have said that there could have been more vigorous efforts that might have led to prosecutions. Now there were cases brought in some of the mortgage companies. There’s also a problem with the statute of limitations, because these are difficult cases to bring. They take a long time. I think we should certainly extend the statute of limitations.
"So I’m not going to second-judge people who I believe were acting in good faith, because I think they were — U.S. attorneys, Department of Justice prosecutors. But they concluded that they could not make cases. So I think we have to have a very robust analysis of what were the real reasons they couldn’t make cases. Are the laws insufficient? Therefore how do we try to make them tougher as a deterrent and make it clear to people in the financial services industry that there’s a new sheriff in town so that there will be additional legal requirements and we will resource better."
I like that: I'm not going to second-judge people I believe were acting in good faith.
While at State, this was a major core idea of her's: the danger of overcorrecting. She is right. So often in politics this is exactly what is done.
She is very sensitive to this tendency to overreact and overcorrect, and it's something I agree with her on, wholeheartedly.
What we learn from Bernie,is the price of being so categorical: the banks must be broken up and the bankers must go to jail is you end up speaking less from being informed than just being passionate.
Passion is great but it must be informed by knowledge.
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