So, this article is a ‘fisking’ of Clinton’s economic plan meant to show how, as the title suggests, Clinton will create poverty. This article was written by an actual economist (though the fact that he has elected to work with highly conservative think tanks and tends towards more politics than economics says a lot) who resorts to calling Clinton and the OECD and basically anyone he politically disagrees with ‘statists’.

However, not only is there never an argument made about how Clinton would increase poverty (besides some insinuation about the minimum wage), the short spurts of analysis he deems fit to provide are riddled with bad assumptions and misleading applications of statistics. I am going to focus mainly on the claims that he puts some substance into, because this article covers a lot of different subjects.

After getting past the first few paragraphs which are used to basically show how ridiculous statists are, he gets into the actual economics.

A laudable sentiment, for sure, but it’s important at this point to ask what is meant by “poverty.” If we’re talking about wretched material deprivation, what’s known as “absolute poverty,” then we have good news. Virtually nobody in the United States is in that tragic category (indeed, one of great success stories in recent decades is that fewer and fewer people around the world endure this status). But if we’re talking about the left’s new definition of poverty (promoted by the statists at the OECD), which is measured relative to a nation’s median level of income, then you can have “poverty” even if nobody is poor.

While not technically wrong that you could have poverty without ‘true’ poverty, it seems disingenuous to imply that because there is no “absolute poverty” in the US, there is no poverty at all. Poverty looks different in different countries and what makes you poor in India does not make you poor in America. Poverty is measured not only in strictly how much money you make, but also by what you can purchase with that money and how that compares to your country’s standard of living.

The US has one of the worst child poverty rates in the developed world and 17% of households with children experience food insecurity.

Saying that just because almost no one in the US makes less than 2 dollars a day that we shouldn't worry about poverty is a farce.

If Obama gets credit for the good numbers of 2015, then shouldn’t he be blamed for the bad numbers between 2009-2014? Shouldn’t it matter that there are still more people in poverty in 2015 than there were in 2008? And is it really good news that it’s taken Obama so long to finally get median income above the 2008 level, particularly when you see how fast income grew during the Reagan boom?

For someone calling out misleading statistics he seems to have a penchant for them.

Even if there are more people in poverty, the percentage of people poor or near poor in 2015 is the exact same as it was in 2008 (table 6 from here).

Also, median income per household (when adjusting for number of household members) is now the highest it has been since before the tech bubble burst and arguably the highest ever (and this is not even counting the variety of other reasons why census numbers on income growth understate it).

This all of course is ignoring the fact that putting the 2009-2015 numbers on Obama when they were results of the Great Recession, which was unequivocally not his fault, is absurd.

The comment about equal pay sounds noble, though I strongly suspect it is based on dodgy data and that she really favors the very dangerous idea of “comparable worth” legislation, which would lead to bureaucrats deciding the value of jobs.

Here he links to his own blog post about the subject, and you can refer to any of the many great posts made in this sub about why this 'debunking' of the gender pay gap is wrong, but the thrust of the argument is

1. Holding a bunch of variables constant to explain away the gap gives you a misleading answer because the things you are holding constant is what is causing the gap in the first place (and seem to be caused by societal norms that negatively impact women, i.e. sexism). Pre-market discrimination is still discrimination, and even then when you control for these variables a (small) gender gap still emerges

2. Saying that businesses should just hire women and reap the profits of cheap labor seems to miss that discrimination is a) a preference firms choose to pay for, b) this assumes free entry for non-discriminatory (or less discriminatory) firms and c) the average amount of discrimination is not the same as the marginal amount of discrimination. All of these points are better explained by /u/mrregmonkey here.

And, last but not least, she wants to throw good money after bad into the failed Head Start program.

This is in response to Clinton stating

We need to expand access to high-quality child care and guarantee paid leave . . . we will work to double investments in Early Head Start and make preschool available to every 4-year-old.

Although evidence on Head Start itself seems to be mixed (with many of the benefits apparently fading over time), here are two papers on how Head Start specifically generates enough long run benefits to justify itself and here is one in favor of universal preschool in general.