Abby McCloskey writes at National Review Online about the likely effect of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s preferred policy proposals.
She enjoys the highest level of support from women of any presidential candidate in four decades. She leads Trump 59 percent to 35 percent among Democratic and Republican female voters, according to Pew Research. She is likely to smash “the final, hardest glass ceiling,” according to the betting markets and most public polling.
Which raises the question: Is Hillary Clinton actually good for women?
When it comes to the economy and jobs — voters’ No. 1 concern — the answer is probably not.
Hillary has rejected her husband’s New Democrat platform, which led to one of the most successful economic periods for American women. Free trade, fiscal responsibility, and welfare reform were followed by rising wages in the 1990s and by the highest labor-force participation rate among women ever reached in America: 60 percent in 1999.
Instead, she has taken a page from President Obama’s playbook for economic growth, accepting as the new normal the weakest economic recovery since World War II.
That means that Obama-era weakness would continue, which isn’t great for women (or men, for that matter). Median weekly earnings for women working full-time increased by less than 1 percent from 2009 to 2015. The labor-force participation rate for women is 56.6 percent and trending downward. And economic growth is trundling along at 1.1 percent, with projected growth rates not expected to surpass 2 percent, which will do nothing to create new opportunities for working women.
