Hillary Clinton Campaign Press Release - Shared Prosperity for American Families

Hillary's Agenda to Fight Special Interests and Restore Fairness to Our Economy

With our economy slipping into recession, American families need a President who will fight for their economic interests from day one. For seven years, President Bush has focused on special interests in Washington rather than on families struggling to make ends meet. Special interests have had free reign in the Bush Administration—receiving tax giveaways, no-bid contracts, and sweetheart deals. Hillary believes we must take back power from these special interests and restore it to families who need help the most. For 35 years, she has been a doer and a fighter for working families. She's fought tough battles against the insurance companies and drug companies - fighting for universal health care when it was a lonely battle in the 1990s. As President, she will again take on the special interests and restore the voices of working families.

Today, Hillary outlined her comprehensive plan to reign in the special interests. Hillary's plan will take back at least $55 billion per year from special interests including the drug companies, oil companies, and firms that ship jobs overseas.* She will invest these resources in supporting middle class families by lowering the cost of college, reducing health care costs, and creating good jobs here at home. As president, she will:

• Close corporate loopholes that encourage the outsourcing of US jobs, enact a bipartisan Corporate Subsidy Commission to eliminate wasteful corporate giveaways, and invest in creating good high-paying manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
• Enact a Fair Credit for Families Agenda to protect American families from abusive credit card practices like excessive fees and sudden rate hikes.
• End giveaways to private student loan companies and create a Student Borrowers Bill of Rights to protect against predatory lending practices that are bankrupting students and mortgaging their futures.
• Create a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund by ending tax breaks and subsidies for the oil and gas industry and imposing a windfall profit tax on big oil companies. The Fund will invest in clean energy technologies and help create five million new, green collar jobs.
• Restore fairness to our tax code by making sure Wall Street investment managers never pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, and by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
• Crack down on unscrupulous mortgage lenders to ensure that families are no longer lured into mortgages they can't afford.
• Put an end to health insurance company discrimination, so that no American is every again denied coverage, refused renewal of an insurance policy, unfairly priced out of the market, or charged excessive insurance premiums.

Shared Prosperity for American Families

Hillary's Agenda to Fight Special Interests and Restore Fairness to Our Economy

1. End corporate subsidies and loopholes that encourage the outsourcing of US jobs, and invest in creating good, high-paying jobs in America. In recent years, as corporate profits have skyrocketed, the percentage of taxes paid by corporations has actually fallen. Rather than working to ensure that corporations pay their fair share, our government provides billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies to corporations each year, and actually offers tax incentives for companies that transfer jobs and production overseas. As President, Hillary will create a bi-partisan Corporate Subsidy Commission to identify unnecessary and outdated corporate subsidies for elimination. The commission will present its recommendations in full to Congress for an up-or-down vote – without amendments – to ensure that special interests cannot interfere to protect their own subsidies. [American Dream Initiative, 2005]. She will also end the no-bid contracting that has become pervasive over the past seven years and cut 500,000 government contractors over 10 years.

In addition, Hillary will end the tax incentives to companies that ship jobs overseas, and invest those resources in creating good, high-paying jobs here in the U.S. Hillary believes that we cannot be a great country if we do not make things in America, and she will fight to ensure that our domestic manufacturing industry thrives in the 21st Century. As President, she will reverse the Bush Administration's proposed 95% cut in the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP). The MEP is a network of hundreds of specialists who work with small and medium-sized manufacturing businesses to help them grow and create good-paying jobs. Small manufacturing firms employ more than 10 million Americans. MEP plays a vital part in ensuring that these companies innovate, grow more efficient, and revitalize our manufacturing base. MEP helps small businesses overcome the challenges associated with having small budgets, limited access to new technology, and lack of in-house expertise. The program serves 25,000 manufacturing customers every year. Despite MEP's demonstrated success, President Bush's latest budget proposes to slashfederal funding by 90% to only $4 million. Hillary will restore MEP's $90 million budget because, unlike President Bush, she believes that America's manufacturing base matters.

2. End Abusive Credit Card Practices. Middle-class Americans dealing with resetting mortgages and rising health care, college, and energy costs are depending more and more on credit cards to stay afloat. Americans have a record $940 billion in revolving debt, and the average person carries up to nine different credit cards. For the past three decades, credit card companies and major banks have been subject to less and less regulation. Most state regulations today do not apply to credit card companies, and federal law sets few restrictions on what they can do. At the same time, payday lenders are taking advantage of families that have fallen on hard times. In 2005, payday lenders earned $4.2 billion in excessive loan fees.

Hillary will take on the credit card companies and the predatory payday lenders with a Fair Credit for Families Agenda. She will immediately impose a 30 percent cap on annual interest rates for credit cards and work toward a lower cap that is linked to a standard benchmark. She will create a Financial Product Safety Commission to crack down on abusive and predatory lenders and to protect consumers who use credit cards, car loans, home mortgages, and other financial products. Hillary will put an end to the outrageous credit card company practices, including hiking interest rates without warning or consent; applying new interest rates to old transactions; and raising rates because of unrelated credit score changes. She will require that credit card companies provide clear, easy-to-understand information about credit card terms and fees. Hillary will also take on payday lenders by capping their interest rates and stopping them from evading state consumer protection laws. In addition to ending abuses, she will empower communities to help families control their own financial destiny through improved financial literacy and better borrowing opportunities.

3. End Predatory Student Loan Practices. Hillary is proposing a Student Borrower's Bill of Rights to end the predatory loan practices of the private student loan industry that are bankrupting students and mortgaging their futures. Her plan will end the sweetheart deals between the student lenders and college financial aid officers in which financial aid officers receive stock options, gifts, trips, and other giveaways in exchange for a leg up when competing for students' business. Attorney General Cuomo of New York blew the whistle on these arrangements last year. His investigation resulted in a dozen lenders, including the eight biggest student lenders in the United States, agreeing to contribute $13.7 million to a fund to educate student borrowers and a dozen schools reimbursing $3.4 million collectively to students. Hillary will also end the days of student lenders using deceptive advertising practices, like aggressively marketing their products to college students without regard to their financial circumstances or ability to afford the payment; advertising the lowest possible interest rate as opposed to the range; using college brand names to deceive borrowers into believing they are signing up for a safer, federal loan; describing the loan terms and conditions in a way that makes it virtually impossible to compare them to other options; and not disclosing the basic terms, rates, and conditions, such as the monthly payment. And she'll end the preferential treatment that private student lenders receive in bankruptcy law and treat private loans the same as other consumer debt. Private loans have grown by 27% annually over the past five years, and expanded their market share from five to 20 percent of the total student loan volume over the past decade. Two-thirds of students take out loans, and tuition has gone up 40% in the last five years alone. Under Hillary's plan, every student borrower will have the right to transparent, accurate and timely information about the basic terms, conditions and requirements of the loan; the right to affordable loan payments; and a right to impartial, unbiased advice when taking out a loan.

4. Create a $50 Billion Strategic Energy Fund and Demand that Oil Companies Invest in Clean Energy: In 2007, many of the largest oil companies recorded record profits. Exxon earned $40.6 billion, the highest profit for any U.S. company in history. Hillary believes it is time for oil companies to do their share in funding clean energy technologies. She would give oil companies a choice: invest more in renewable energy technology or pay into a Strategic Energy Fund. The Strategic Energy Fund would also eliminate oil company tax breaks and make sure that oil companies pay their fair share in royalties when drilling on public lands. This fund would jumpstart a clean energy future by injecting $50 billion over ten years into research, development and deployment of renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean coal technology, ethanol and other homegrown biofuels. These investments, along with the other components of her comprehensive energy plan will lay the foundation for our economy to create at least 5 million high-paying green collar jobs over the next decade.

5. Restore Fairness to Our Tax Code: During a period when the typical worker has seen their incomes fall by nearly $1,000, George Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans have undermined the fairness of our tax code and mortgaged our fiscal future. As President, Hillary will restore fairness to our tax code by lowering taxes for middle-class families while asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. She will provide new tax benefits to help middle class families afford healthcare, college and long-term care, and offer new matching tax cuts to help families save. She will extend the middle class tax cuts including the child tax credit and marriage penalty relief, and triple the EITC for single workers. At the same time, Hillary will close the carried interest loophole that currently allows a Wall Street investment manager making $5 million to pay a lower tax rate than a teacher making $50,000. She will let the Bush income tax cuts expire for those making more than $250,000 and freeze the estate tax at its 2009 level of $7 million per couple.

6. Crack Down on Mortgage Industry Abuses. Unscrupulous lenders and brokers contributed to the mortgage crisis by saddling families with mortgages they could not afford. In the process, they often gave risky subprime mortgages to families who qualified for conventional loans. Banks actually penalized families who tried to pay off their mortgages early. And they hid the details in complicated fine print. Building on her aggressive plans to address the mortgage crisis, Hillary will put an end to this racket and hold lenders and brokers accountable. For nearly a year, Hillary has been proposing more fair underwriting practices and better disclosure rules. She has also introduced the Home Ownership Preservation Act to crack down on egregious abusive lending practices, rein in unscrupulous brokers, punish mortgage-related fraud, and expand access to financial counseling services.

7. Eliminate Health Insurance Company Discrimination, and End the Giveaways to Drug Companies and HMOs: Today, health insurance companies spend more than $50 billion on elaborate calculations and schemes to figure out how not to cover people. Hillary's American Health Choices Plan would end this practice by requiring that insurers cover anyone who applies and pays their premium, automatically renew policies if enrollees wish to stay in their plans, and set fair pricing rules for insurance premiums. Under Hillary's plan, health plans will compete on cost and quality rather than avoiding patients who need insurance the most. In addition, Hillary's plan will bring down drug costs for consumers by allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices; creating a pathway for biogeneric drug competition; removing barriers to generic competition; and providing more oversight over pharmaceutical companies' financial relationships with providers. And Hillary's plan will phase out excessive overpayments to HMOs that are reducing Medicare's solvency and raising premiums for Medicare beneficiaries.

* Hillary's policies to take on the special interests will raise at least $55 billion per year that she will reinvest in supporting middle class families by lowering the cost of college, reducing health care costs, and creating good jobs here at home. This $55 billion is a conservative estimate of the impact of her policy proposals, including $7.5 billion per year in eliminated tax breaks and subsidies for oil companies [ details here]; at least $20 billion from phasing out overpayments to HMOs and forcing drug companies to compete [ details here]; $15 billion from eliminating tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas [ details here]; $10-$18 billion from ending no-bid contracts and cutting at least 500,000 government contractors [ details here]; about $4 billion from eliminating giveaways to student lenders [ details here]; and $2.5 billion from closing the loophole that allows Wall Street managers to pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries [ details here].