Environmentalists should be pleased with Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night, because it was largely recycled talking points we have heard for decades.

Putting aside the theatrics designed to make Hillary Clinton appear to be something she is not — the white pantsuit was a nice touch, as white is traditionally the color of purity and also the color of the suffragettes — we’ve heard it all before.

First there was the charge that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump cannot be trusted with the nuclear codes. The same was said about Ronald Reagan in 1980. Democrats called him a “cowboy” who might blow up the world. Instead, he rebuilt America’s military, as Trump has promised to do, and helped bring down the Soviet Union. Can Hillary be trusted with classified documents?

What would an acceptance speech by a Democrat be without promises of more programs? She’d have done better listing past and current programs that have not worked and vowing to get rid of them.

Hillary Clinton’s proposals will add hugely to the debt, now approaching $20 trillion. But wait. She will pay for all this new stuff by taxing those obscenely wealthy Wall Street people, who paid her and her husband millions to speak to them. No one knows what about. She won’t release the transcripts.

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) has analyzed Clinton’s proposed $1 trillion list of tax increases. They include:

• Increasing income taxes by $350 billion with a 28 percent cap on itemized deductions.

• Businesses would be slapped with a tax hike of $250 billion through “undefined business tax reform.”

• There’s the euphemistically named “fairness tax” of $400 billion she says would restore “basic fairness” to our tax code and an increase in the death tax. Real fairness would eliminate the undecipherable tax code and replace it with a fair tax.

ATR notes: “…there are even more Clinton tax hike proposals not included in the tally above. Her campaign has failed to release specific details for many of her proposals. The true Clinton net tax hike figure is likely much higher than $1 trillion.”

Despite the claims of her husband that she is the best “change maker” he’s ever known, change was what President Obama promised, but failed to deliver. She would be Obama’s third term.

Polls increasingly indicate a majority of voters want real change this time around. More people are being drawn to Trump’s message that the political system is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is “crooked.”

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News analysis has found that one-fifth of Democrats view her unfavorably. Donald Trump also suffers from high negatives, but because of Hillary Clinton’s thin record of accomplishment she will have to tear down Trump because as Kimberley Strassel concludes in her Wall Street Journal column, “It’s Hillary against Hillary. This November is about whether Americans can look at 40 years of Clinton chicanery and nearly a decade of broken Obama promises, and still pull the lever for her.”

It’s going to be a formidable task to try to recycle Hillary Clinton.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.