Candidate Evaluations: Hillary Clinton

The inevitable has happened–Hillary Clinton has announced that she’s running for president. And so it’s once again time to continue my Candidate Evaluations series, where we examine a candidate’s background, policy history, and explicit statements in an attempt to figure out whether the candidate would actually be any good at being president. Too often, no one bothers to ask these question, focusing instead on electability or likability. So far, we’ve covered Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, neither of which did especially well. Will Hillary Clinton fare any better?

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Romney and Disaster Relief

In the wake of the recent hurricane, new attention is being paid to this clip from the primary debates in which Romney condemns federal funding for disaster relief:

While the hurricane has drawn attention to this quip, its intellectual value, positively or negatively, is independent of this particular situation and deserves to be judged on its own merits, and that is precisely what today’s post is all about–the merits of the notion that the federal government should do less.

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Paul Ryan’s Magical Fantasy Budget

So Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan to be his running mate in the US Presidential election. It is a very telling choice. As regular readers will know, Mitt Romney proposed a tax policy that was more or less mathematically impossible without inflicting severe tax penalties on the bottom 95% of tax payers. It just so happens that Paul Ryan is guilty of precisely the same magical thinking. Let’s explore.

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