We haven’t heard very much talk about Hillary Clinton’s plan to give $5000 to each new baby born in the United States, but she has announced it.

Tuesday’s Chicago Tribune has an editorial about it too.

Vote for me, a candidate might say, and I’ll cut taxes or boost school spending or protect your embattled industry from foreign competition. But Hillary Clinton is taking a more direct approach to parents. Vote for me, she said the other day, and I might just give you $5,000. The proposition, of course, was not so direct as to constitute a bribe, but it proved that in the realm of audacity, Barack Obama has some serious competition. She told an audience at a forum sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, “I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grown over time, so that when that young person turns 18, if they have finished high school, they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that down payment on their first home.”

That’s right — a $5,000 bonus just for coming into the world….

…The idea pleased Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), a Clinton supporter who was there. Said she, “Every child born in the United States today owes $27,000 on the national debt; why not let them come get $5,000 to grow until they’re 18?”

But Jones inadvertently highlighted the big flaw in the concept. It would be expensive — about $20 billion a year — and Clinton offered no way to pay for it. Absent a funding source, the cost would simply be piled on to the existing federal budget deficit, which is another way of saying it would be paid for by future taxpayers.

So instead of owing $27,000 each on the national debt at birth (actually, it’s now above $29,000), newborns would owe even more. They’d get the gift at birth — and the bill a little later….

…Her suggestion brings to mind the comment of the 19th Century French economist Frederic Bastiat: “The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else.” In the end, as the purported beneficiaries of her proposal would eventually find out to their sorrow, nothing comes for free.

This hair-brained idea is only a ploy to get the votes of people who don’t look past their noses. It’s just one more step toward cradle to grave socialism and a slippery slope it is.

How long before Big Brother decides when it’s time to terminate a person’s life because it’s a drag on the economy?

This woman is calculating, dangerous and a devout socialist. We need to make sure she is not our next president or we will regret it for the rest of our lives, friends.