Carly Fiorina rips Hillary Clinton’s ‘big government’ economic agenda

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina on Sunday blasted Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new economic agenda that is supposed to close the wage gap, saying the Democrat’s liberal remedies would actually worsen income inequality.

Mrs. Fiorina said that the “big government” remedies from Mrs. Clinton, who remains the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nominee, would crush the small businesses that are the engine of economic expansion and job creation.

“The truth is, Hillary Clinton’s ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism,” Mrs. Fiorina, a former chief executive officer at Hewlett Packard, said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“When you have a 70,000-page tax code, you’ve got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well-connected to dig your way through that tax code,” she said. “What I will continue to point out is the fact that every policy she is pursuing will make income inequality worse, not better — crony capitalism even worse, not better. And meanwhile, we will continue to crush the businesses that create jobs and middle class families.”

Mrs. Clinton is scheduled to outline her economic plan in a speech Monday at the New School in New York, but details of the speech were leaked to the media by the Clinton campaign. Her plan includes familiar liberal proposals: increased taxes on the wealthy, higher federal minimum wage, more government spending on infrastructure projects, new child care benefits, federal subsidies for college tuition, and laws to help expand unions.

Mrs. Clinton will present her plan as an answer to the wage stagnation that has hobbled the middle class, which she will declare as the defining economic challenge of the era.

Mrs. Fiorina said she agrees that income inequality is a “huge problem,” though she said Mrs. Clinton is wrong about how to narrow the income gap.

“Let’s look to the state of California, where I lived for 12 years,” she said. “Liberal policies have been in place for decades, and yet there are 111 billionaires — good for them — the highest poverty rates in the nation, the exodus of the middle class, the destruction of industry after industry. Now they’re destroying agriculture in California.”

She said she agrees with GOP rival former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who set a goal of 4 percent economic growth, rather than the current lethargic rate of 1 percent or 2 percent.

Mrs. Fiorina said the focus should be on the “true engine of economic growth and job creation.”

“It has always been small businesses, new businesses, family-owned businesses, community-based businesses that create two-thirds of the jobs and employ half the people,” she said. “And we are now crushing those businesses. In fact, we are destroying more businesses in the United States now that are being created for the first time in our history.”

She continued: “Meanwhile, crony capitalism is alive and well — the big are bigger, the wealthy are getting wealthier — because with a very large powerful complicated government, which is what we have and which Democrats want more of, only the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected can survive.”