past two D's have pulled the economy out from recession into (in one case, the best times this country saw in a generation; in the other case, the best that could have been expected given the massive structural obstructions he faced).
I long for a day when Bill Clinton's term is reassessed from the perspective of what he actually did as opposed to what happened during his term.
Clinton had a recession end just before he took office, and another begin two months after he left office. The length of the expansion was due to forces decades in the making, especially in the area of technology, as well as the pursuit of regulatory and tax changes from multiple Presidents from both parties during periods when times were much tougher.
Deregulating airlines and railroads is one thing though. And the presumption on a bipartisan basis in the 1990's that expanding such deregulation to all areas and all sectors was misguided, especially with regards to a sector such as finance in an era when so much of the economy was becoming heavily reliant on debt both and the consumer and corporate level. Of course these occurred in his second term when the 1990's economy was reaching its peak levels of performance. But even so, the legislation with the most impact that Clinton signed were the vast deregulation bills Bill Clinton signed into law in 1997 and 1999. Of course I highly doubt Dole or some other Republican would have vetoed those bills. The only one at the time who might have done so would have either been Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan and neither of them were going to be President.
Second to that would have to be NAFTA, which benefited certain areas, benefited the overall GDP and certainly was to Wall Street's liking, but there is no arguing that it left communities across America high and dry and nothing meaningful was done to mitigate the damage to the tax base for schools nor to the employment situation in many of these communities.
It makes sense politically to attach oneself to the 1990's from the perspective of a Democrat, but dig a little deeper and you have to square a near austerity based approach (raising taxes to balance the budget and "boost the economy") with the purported economic philosophy that Democrats adhere to.
The simple fact of the matter is that the 1991 recession was over by the time Clinton took office. The campaign exaggerated its depth and length to weigh on Bush's population and facilitate their acquisition of power. The 1991 recession was not the worse recession since the Great Depression. The only ones who thought so were a bunch of white collar yuppies who for the first time felt the brunt of a recession (economy shifts to service based industries, those previously unharmed sectors now get hit by recessions, who knew?), and one Donald J. Trump who saw his property values tank, nearly bankrupting him.
Clinton's 1993 budget was not designed to be a stimulus, it was designed to be a deficit reduction plan sacrificing economic growth to achieve said goal. A middle class tax cut was promised down the road, but never delivered. The reason for this approach was because the economy was no longer in recession, and was growing at a fast clip as it rebounded from the recession and the budget deficit was viewed as a bigger problem.
In hindsight, we probably would all be better off today, if Clinton ate deficits throughout his whole term and instead pumped a massive infusion of infrastructure spending down the pipeline. The current level of debt might ironically be lower and the economy stronger, most likely.
From that perspective, Bush 43 was poor man for the job who was on top of that dealt a very losing hand, which arguably he played the worst way possible between the War in Iraq and trying to us a debt fueled housing bubble to lead an economic expansion.
Obama was a dealt an even worse hand in some respects but he played it much better than Bush did and the end result has been somewhat positive for him economically. That being said, completing flipping the 2012 narrative that he was unpopular on the economy and strong on foreign policy, his approach to the world has been nothing but a disastrous legacy project, which has weakened our position in many areas and allowed the threat of radical islam to morph into a far more dangerous form, but that is a topic for a different time.
Bill Clinton governed this country the way that Donald Trump ran his businesses. Stealing credit for other people's work by putting his name all over it, and shafting others with the price for his mistakes and poor decisions. If there is any justice at all, the Clintons will go down in history as the greatest political con artists in American history.
I don't think what you're saying is that controversial any more. Bill's legacy came under heavy attack in the primaries on multiple fronts.
But the criticism of Bill Clinton is that he was too deregulatory and austerian, and should have spent more on infrastructure, which hardly makes it a problem for Democrats or the left, since that's where it's coming from. Except strictly as a matter of personal judgement against him. It's like Nixon being attacked for imposing wage and price controls. The actual economically progressive initiatives Bill passed are left unscathed:
- Family and Medical Leave
- Raising the top tax bracket
- Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit
- Raising the minimum wage
And it shouldn't be a worry especially since Hillary is campaigning to the left of her husband on pretty much all of the issues mentioned mentioned, including financial regulation, and her party, (which never supported NAFTA in the first place at the Congressional level), has clearly moved to the left as well.
And while Hillary did publicly support Bill's economic policies in the 1990s (what First Lady would campaign against her own husband's policies?) she has a consistent record on being to his left. She was
by accounts in the opposite wing than his Rubinite advisors during the two years she was actually involved in WH policy. She ran to the left of Obama on economic policy in 2008. Not to mention the policies she's proposing in her current campaign.
Meanwhile, Trump is still proposing massive tax breaks for his fellow real estate developers.
Again, the Democrats should own the economy question. That they are losing it to Trump is malpractice.
