Steven Hill, a Senior Fellow at the New American Foundation, has some advice for Hillary Clinton. He wants her to run on “. . . a bold issue that fires the imagination of voters,” namely a doubling of Social Security benefits projected to cost an additional $662 billion per year.

Hill calls his solution to the problem of meager SS benefits which only provide about 40% of a worker’s wages, Social Security Plus. Since I’ve previously advocated for doubling Social Security benefits myself, I’m happy to see Hill advocate for it too. That kind of “expansion” of SS, coupled with enhanced Medicare for All legislation would allow FDR’s promise of a dignified retirement for all to be realized.

As Hill argues, such a program would also be a great stimulus for the economy generally, since the consumption unleashed by Social Security Plus would boost the whole economy substantially, and also relieve business of the burden of providing retirement benefits for most workers. In addition it would provide a universal and portable safety net for Americans reaching retirement age.

Of course, after offering his proposal, he turns to the inevitable question of “How we can afford to pay for it”, and spends most of his article outlining a step-by-step approach to taxing people who are well off or rich in order to acquire the revenue he believes is needed for the federal government get the banks to mark up the accounts of Social Security recipients.

He sets his target of increased tax revenue at approximately $662 billion and then outlines tax policies that he projects will yield more than that amount, namely $900 billion. Here is his revenue program and its projected federal savings:

— eliminate the unfair Social Security payroll cap — $135 billion;

— apply a Social Security tax to investment income – billions more;

— eliminate tax shelters and loopholes for 1-percenter households and businesses – around $19 billion;

— eliminate the tax exclusion that employers receive for sponsoring their company’s retirement plans — $100 billion;

— scrap other tax breaks that have failed to enhance the retirement security of most Americans (such as IRA, 401 (k)s, and home ownership related tax subsidies including home mortgage interest deductions, state and local property tax deductions, and capital gains rates much lower than ordinary income tax rates – the remaining $646 billion.

Steven Hill concludes with this:

With support among even Republicans extremely high, there appears to be no political risk to Hillary Clinton being out front on this issue. The Clinton campaign should become a key catalyst in this movement by leading the way during this presidential election. What is she waiting for?

The Republican support he’s referring to is approval for the idea of SS expansion. However, polling support for it among Republicans isn’t expressed in a context where the legislation contains the various new tax measures offered by Hill. If it were I doubt that the results would show that 70% of Republican voters were OK with the government ending $646 billion in subsidies for IRAs, 401(k)s, and home ownership subsidies.

I think the ads promoting hysteria about this part of Hill’s proposal practically write themselves. If Hillary Clinton ever advanced them she’d be handing most Republicans and a large number of Democrats back to Trump and would also unify the Republican Party is a renewed burst of Hillary hatred.

In making his Social Security Plus proposal, Hill decides unnecessarily to pick two fights at the same time, a continuing feature of “The Progressive Give-up Formula.” The first fight is the one to get SS benefits doubled. It is a fight for increased federal spending.

The second fight Hill picks is an unnecessary one if one is focused on getting SS benefits doubled. Its purposes are to increase tax revenues sufficiently to (1) destroy net financial assets of the rich and relatively well-off people, in order to decrease economic inequality; and (2) get the Federal Reserve to mark up Treasury spending accounts by the needed $662 billion.

The second of these is unnecessary because if Congress appropriates the spending to double SS payments, but doesn’t mandate increased taxes, then the Treasury is free to use other methods to fill its spending accounts with the necessary reserves. The various methods it can use are reviewed elsewhere.

They include using platinum coin seigniorage to force the Fed to create the reserves the Treasury needs. The existence and legality of this method means that Congress need not legislate Hill’s increased taxes in order to legislate doubling of SS benefits, and that it is a myth to insist that picking a fight to pass the taxes is a necessary part of the process of passing the benefit increase.

As for the first purpose of the tax plan, it too is unnecessary, at least in the short run. Reducing inequality is an important goal, and, in the long run, the issue of a very few people having too much in the way of net financial assets is critical for the future of democracy. But proposing to immediately reduce these net financial assets as part of the process of providing a dignified retirement to those in retirement only creates ferocious resistance to the proposal to double benefits, where otherwise resistance would be based much more on abstract fears about the future rather than a concrete proposal to take people’s assets in the short term.

So, the old adage “let sleeping dogs lie” applies here. Of course, it’s true that a proposal to double SS benefits, unaccompanied by provisions to pay for it with increased taxes will involve charges of “fiscal irresponsibility” and a great effort to educate people about the facts of fiat currency systems and the implications of monetary sovereignty. But the Clinton campaign can handle that education task if it’s willing to change its beliefs about the deficit, the debt, the debt-to-GDP ratio and fiscal austerity.

If it cannot do that, then it will lose the opportunity to bury Donald Trump under an avalanche of votes as well as the opportunity to bring seniors home to a Democratic Party that is finally proposing to secure one of FDR’s essential economic rights for them and all who follow after them. That would be a great shame because a campaign based on securing the right to a dignified old age would create the landslide they need to pass a broad ranging progressive economic agenda that would open the way to solving many our most serious problems.