Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign in Monticello, Iowa, on Tuesday with aggressive attacks on the financial system as she offered broad strokes of her case for running at her first formal event.
"I think it’s fair to say that if you look across the country, the deck is stacked in favor of those already at the top," she said at a roundtable in an auto tech lab at Kirkwood Community College. "There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the American worker … There’s something wrong when American workers keep getting more productive … but that productivity is not matched in their paychecks."
And, the former secretary of state continued, "there’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay less in taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80” while driving from New York to Iowa over the past two days.
The visit here was her second semi-public stop of the day, after a morning run for chai and conversation at a coffee shop in Le Claire, just north of the Quad Cities. There, she joked about "drink[ing] my way across Iowa," but even more important than those drinks are the conversations she plans to have with intentionally small groups of voters.
Around a U-shaped table, Clinton spent an hour with a handful of high school and college students, a teacher, and the college's president. She listened to their views about education and the economy, asking pointed questions along the way.
But she made more than a few nods to the dozens of members of the media who gathered to see her. "I'm running for president because I think Americans and their families need a champion and I want to be that champion," she said, echoing her comments in Sunday's announcement video.
Clinton said she’s anxious to hear from Americans about what’s important for them and what policies they see working in their own communities, but also that she decided to start with a baseline of "four big fights” she wants to wage:
—To "build the economy of tomorrow not yesterday.”
—To “strengthen families and communities.”
—To “fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all – even if that means a constitutional amendment.”
—And to protect the country "from the threats that we see and the ones that are on the horizon."
Hillary Clinton Comes Out Swinging At CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers
April 14, 2015
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I just skimmed this article but statements like this are feeding an ignorant cancer in America: "there’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay less in taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80†Pandering to the masses with misinformation and class warfare is not just political maneuvering and vote gathering. It has the real potential to destroy the long term economic power of the US as we know it. Top earners pay pretty much all of the taxes in this country. It is true that some "income" for financial sponsors and hedge fund managers is treated as long term cap gains and one could argue that perhaps that should be revisited. Nevertheless, top earners paying income tax or paying income tax and cap gains are still paying the most in absolute dollars any way you cut it. An open discussion of true tax reform should be welcomed but misguiding an audience that is easily manipulated is outright shameful. And don't get me started on AMT.... With April 15 just behind us it is ridiculous that AMT catches pretty much all middle and upper middle income tax payers. The upper, upper earners blow right through it so at the end of the end of the day it is just a stealth tax on overtaxed people to begin with. Pease amendment, Medicare surtax, AMT, etc, etc.