With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy.
Mrs. Clinton has not had to wade into domestic policy since before she became secretary of state in 2009, and she has spent the past few months engaged in policy discussions with economists on the left and closer to the Democratic Party’s center who are grappling with the discontent set off by the gap between rich and poor. Sorting through the often divergent advice to develop an economic plan could affect the timing and planning of the official announcement of her campaign.
Although people close to Mrs. Clinton say she has not yet settled on a specific platform, she is expected to embrace several principles. They include standard Democratic initiatives like raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure, closing corporate tax loopholes and cutting taxes for the middle class. Other ideas are newer, such as providing incentives to corporations to increase profit-sharing with employees and changing labor laws to give workers more collective bargaining power.
Behind many of these proposals is a philosophy, endorsed by Mrs. Clinton’s closest economic advisers and often referred to as inclusive capitalism, that contends that a majority of Americans do not want to punish the rich; they just want to feel that they, too, have a chance to succeed. It also calls for corporations to put less emphasis on short-term profits that increase shareholder value and to invest more in employees, the environment and communities.
Whether Mrs. Clinton’s approach will be enough to satisfy the unease over growing economic disparity is unclear. In a Gallup poll conducted last month, 67 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed in the United States. In the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Mrs. Clinton’s economic message — summed up by a frequent refrain, “If you work hard, you play by the rules, you ought to be able to get ahead” — resonated with white, working-class voters, who overwhelmingly supported her over Barack Obama.
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Mrs. Clinton frequently talks about the economic success of the Clinton administration, under which median family income, adjusted for inflation, increased to $56,080 in 1999 from $48,884 in 1993, compared with a decline to $51,017 in 2012 from $55,987 in 2000, according to census data. But she has acknowledged that a globalized economy calls for new ideas, and many are urging her to go beyond her comfort zone and address the deeper frustrations of those who have not shared in that economy’s benefits.
“Long-term answers about education and skills that help change mobility don’t get at the current frustrations and aggravations,” said Austan D. Goolsbee, an economic adviser to Mr. Obama and a professor at the University of Chicago.
“People want to answer the question, ‘Are we going to be O.K.?’ ” Mr. Goolsbee said. “And then the natural question is, ‘Whose fault was that, and let’s go find those people.’ ”
A version of this article appears in print on February 8, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Economic Plan Is a Quandary for Clinton ’16. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
