If Bernie Sanders and his supporters are still waiting to see whether or not Hillary Clinton is willing to move far enough left on some issues, the release of Clinton's Tech & Innovation Agenda yesterday should make everyone a little bit less concerned.
According to the Clinton campaign website, Hillary's Tech & Innovation Agenda has five key parts, much of which Clinton has touched on in the past. However as Wired reports, there are a few new proposals as well, including deferring student loans interest free and loan forgiveness in general.
From Wired
The presumptive Democratic nominee has touched on tech issues in an ad hoc way before, urging Silicon Valley to help fight radicalization online and calling for greater protection for on-demand workers. This is the first time, however, that Clinton—or any presidential candidate for that matter—is synthesizing these ideas into a comprehensive platform.
Though many pieces of the agenda are policy prescriptions Clinton has announced in the past, including a plan to bring broadband access to every American home by 2020, the tech platform includes newer proposals as well. Her plan would, for instance, allow would-be entrepreneurs to defer their student loans interest free for up to three years as they launch their businesses. Business owners who locate in “distressed communities” or start a social enterprise also could ask the government to forgive as much as $17,500 in loans after five years in business.
The goal of this part of the plan is to encourage millennials to start businesses. Entrepreneurship among young Americans has fallen drastically, and student debt is often cited as one of the greatest obstacles to starting up.
The tech agenda also affirms Clinton’s commitment to net neutrality; her desire to make the United States Digital Service, a tech team that modernizes government processes, a permanent part of the executive branch; her plan to train 50,000 computer science teachers over the next decade; and her interest in ensuring tech companies can recruit top talent from anywhere in the world. According to the platform, Clinton “would ‘staple’ a green card to STEM masters and PhDs from accredited institutions.”
Silicon Valley will probably be most interested, however, in Clinton’s policies regarding privacy and encryption, both topics that have intersected with the country’s national security interests in the wake of the shooting in San Bernardino, California. But the newly released agenda may not satisfy. Though Clinton’s plan notes the importance of tech companies and law enforcement working together to preserve “individual privacy and security?,” it offers little in the way of specifics or new information. Clinton has repeatedly called for collaboration between Silicon Valley and the government to win the war against terrorists both online and off, but it’s never clear just how she’d convince a reluctant tech community to cooperate.
Here is the wording from the Factsheet
Defer Student Loans to Help Young Entrepreneurs:
A smaller proportion of millennials today are starting new ventures as compared to their predecessors. This is not for a lack of desire—more than half of America’s millennials say they want to start a business—but barriers like student debt and a lack of access to credit are holding young people back. Hillary is committed to breaking down barriers and leveling the playing field for entrepreneurs and innovators who are launching their own start-ups. Hillary will allow entrepreneurs to put their federal student loans into a special status while they get their new ventures off the ground. For millions of young Americans, this would mean deferment from having to make any payments on their student loans for up to three years—zero interest and zero principal—as they work through the critical start-up phase of new enterprises. Hillary will explore a similar deferment incentive not just to founders of enterprises, but to early joiners – such as the first 10 or 20 employees. Additionally, for young innovators who decide to launch either new businesses that operate in distressed communities, or social enterprises that provide measurable social impact and benefit, she will offer forgiveness of up to $17,500 of their student loans after five years.
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So there we have it, Hillary Clinton will pull millennials out of from the basement of their parents house and into the world of business simply by allowing loan deferments that don't accumulate interest. For those that can somehow survive a new business in a stressed community for five years, the government will forgive those loans as well.
Just as long as nobody ever addresses the core issues that are driving millennials into debt with no real opportunity to repay that debt to begin with, the status quo will continue to survive, and the politicians will all be left scratching their head as to why these programs just aren't working. Once again, the Federal Reserve and its monetary polices are left intact, and the politicians won't ever be forced to make any real fiscal reforms – that would just be too difficult.
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