The First Broken Promise of Hillary Clinton’s Presidency
Why her vow not to “add a penny to the debt” is an impossible pledge to keep
“I also will not add a penny to the debt,” Clinton said toward the beginning of her final presidential-debate performance. She made a similar pledge two more times that night
.. “She had to have misspoke. The alternative would be absurd,” Dean Baker, a liberal economist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said in an interview Thursday. “Clearly, she is going to add to the debt.”
.. “Whoever is president will actually be adding $9 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years unless they make changes,”
.. Aides on Thursday said she was simply talking about her “pay-as-you-go” approach to fiscal policy, which they characterized as a middle ground between the austerity budgets proposed by Republicans in Congress and the budget-busting tax cuts that Trump has championed.
.. Clinton would be on stronger footing if she had used the word “deficit” instead of “debt.” President Obama, for example, can credibly claim to have presided over a sharp reduction in the annual budget deficit even as the national debt has nearly doubled during his tenure.