FBD
05-02-2014, 02:28 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/us/politics/bill-clinton-defends-his-economic-legacy.html?hp&_r=0
Bill Clinton Defends His Economic Legacy
Former President Bill Clinton, who has grown increasingly frustrated that his economic policies are viewed as out-of-step with the current focus on income inequality, on Wednesday delivered his most muscular defense of his economic legacy.
The speech reflected a strategic effort by Mr. Clinton and his advisers to reclaim the populist ground now occupied by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other ascendant left-leaning Democrats, and, potentially, to lay out an economic message that could propel his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to the White House in 2016.
“My commitment was to restore broad-based prosperity to the economy and to give Americans a chance,” Mr. Clinton told students at Georgetown University, his alma mater, as Mrs. Clinton looked on from the front row. For nearly two hours, the former president defended the impact of policies like welfare overhaul and the earned-income tax credit, and displayed a series of charts detailing the number of people his policies lifted out of poverty.
Photo
Former President Bill Clinton at the swearing in of Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
“You know the rest,” he said of the 1990s. “It worked out pretty well.”
As president, Mr. Clinton presided over one of the healthiest economies in recent memory, but he also forged a new model of a pro-business, pragmatic Democrat who championed public-private partnerships and open markets. His language as president was more focused on lifting the middle class than castigating the wealthy. That should not be confused with a lack of concern for the poor, Mr. Clinton says now.
That nuance has grown harder to communicate in recent weeks, especially as Ms. Warren has promoted her best-selling book, “A Fighting Chance,” which argues that the deck is stacked in favor of big banks and against ordinary people. A cadre of economic advisers has been helping Mr. Clinton crunch data and think about how to better frame his economic legacy — one that included a balanced budget and the creation of 22.7 million jobs — in the context of the current climate of economic populism.
The effort began early this year, when the Clintons were accused of using the swearing-in of Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York as a way to shore up their progressive credentials ahead of Mrs. Clinton’s potential 2016 campaign.
“Today, when someone talks about inequality they’re supposed to be a real left winger,” Mr. Clinton said at a book party in January. Mr. Clinton told the small crowd, which included Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland and a potential rival to Mrs. Clinton, that he had been fighting income inequality since his earliest years in Arkansas politics.
He slyly mocked critics who suggest that he had discovered the inequality issue recently, saying: " ‘Oh, look at Bill Clinton, he went to the swearing-in of Bill de Blasio. He really is slick still.’ ”
Framing his policies effectively has implications beyond Mr. Clinton’s legacy. As she decides whether to run for president in 2016, Mrs. Clinton has come under criticism from some left-leaning Democrats who view her as too cozy with Wall Street. During her 2008 bid, Mrs. Clinton had to balance promoting the economic success of her husband’s administration with distancing herself from policies less popular with Democratic primary voters, like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the deregulation of the financial industry.
Last week, dozens of labor scholars and activists, including Ralph Nader, sent Mrs. Clinton a letter asking her to use her influence with Walmart to urge the retailer to raise wages for its predominantly female work force. From 1986 to 1992, Mrs. Clinton served on the board of Walmart.
“She has been going around the country getting awards and making $200,000 per speech giving soft, cushy addresses on mother and apple pie issues,” Mr. Nader said in an interview. “It just surprises me as to why she wouldn’t come out for something so obvious.”
Mrs. Clinton did advocate raising the minimum wage at a speech in Boston last week. Burns Strider, executive director of Correct the Record, an outside group that defends Mrs. Clinton said, “Prior to it being in style to hold court on the issue of income inequality or lack-of-opportunity, Hillary Clinton was there, not just looking at the issue but taking action.”
Voters generally have a rosy view of the 1990s: Median family income increased to $48,950 in 1999 from $36,959 in 1993. And, from 1992 to 2000, unemployment fell to 7.6 percent from 14.2 percent for African-Americans and to 5.7 percent from 11.6 percent for Hispanics, according to Department of Commerce data.
“People can make their criticisms, but if you look back on the economy, people thought it was pretty darn good, especially for working-class people,” John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Mr. Clinton, and a senior adviser to President Obama, said in an interview last fall.
In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Clinton called inequality “a severe constraint on growth” and said it had not been as much of an issue in the 1990s, when incomes grew more slowly for the richest 20 percent of families than for the poorest 20 percent.
And, he said, he faced a contentious Republican-led Senate and House that would have rejected overheated talk that castigated the wealthy or focused solely on wealth redistribution. Mr. Clinton aimed to appease the other side by also devoting energy to deficit reduction and reforming the welfare system.
Al From, an adviser to Mr. Clinton who worked on his 1992 campaign, said, “We argued starting in 1991 that the progressive position ought to be that nobody who works full time in America to support a family ought to be poor.”
He added, “I’m sure he feels that he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for the economic gains that happened during his administration.”
Critics have accused Mr. Clinton of trying to be all things to all people and said that some of his policies, namely the trade agreements and legislation that allowed the commingling of commercial and investment banks, might have exacerbated the current inequality. Others point out that the Internet boom coincided with his presidency.
“You can say, ‘Oh, Clinton was lucky, he caught the tech boom.’ ‘Clinton was lucky, he came out of a recession,’ ” Mr. Clinton said on Wednesday. He pointed to a chart that showed that 7.7 million people were lifted out of poverty during his administration, compared with 77,000 during the Reagan years.
If she runs in 2016, Mrs. Clinton would confront the inequality issue from a very different place than her husband did in 1992, when he made $35,000 a year as governor of Arkansas. Back then, Mr. Clinton seemed to have a natural connection to people of modest means while his opponent, the elder President George Bush, struggled to say how much a gallon of milk cost.
On Wednesday, Mr. Clinton said he thanked God every day that “Hillary and I and some of our friends in this audience who live in New York probably pay the highest aggregate tax rates in America.”
The challenge is not about personal wealth, but policies, said Robert B. Reich, a secretary of labor under Mr. Clinton. And some policy experts argue that the era of centrist Clinton economics may have expired.
When asked by CNN last fall whether it was “the end of the Clinton Democrats,” Mr. Clinton replied: “There’s probably something to that. America is growing more liberal culturally and more diverse.”
“But, again, let’s not get carried away here,” he added. “I ran on income inequality in 1992.”
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you dumb mfer. all I gotta say is,
Tech Bubble
and
how's Glass Steagall? what's that you say? you're the one that signed that big bank giveaway?
what? shit started crashing up good right after you left, then blow housing bubble to paper over the tech bubble mess?
unreal how people are allowed to rewrite history and it gets reported as truth.
Bill Clinton Defends His Economic Legacy
Former President Bill Clinton, who has grown increasingly frustrated that his economic policies are viewed as out-of-step with the current focus on income inequality, on Wednesday delivered his most muscular defense of his economic legacy.
The speech reflected a strategic effort by Mr. Clinton and his advisers to reclaim the populist ground now occupied by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other ascendant left-leaning Democrats, and, potentially, to lay out an economic message that could propel his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to the White House in 2016.
“My commitment was to restore broad-based prosperity to the economy and to give Americans a chance,” Mr. Clinton told students at Georgetown University, his alma mater, as Mrs. Clinton looked on from the front row. For nearly two hours, the former president defended the impact of policies like welfare overhaul and the earned-income tax credit, and displayed a series of charts detailing the number of people his policies lifted out of poverty.
Photo
Former President Bill Clinton at the swearing in of Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
“You know the rest,” he said of the 1990s. “It worked out pretty well.”
As president, Mr. Clinton presided over one of the healthiest economies in recent memory, but he also forged a new model of a pro-business, pragmatic Democrat who championed public-private partnerships and open markets. His language as president was more focused on lifting the middle class than castigating the wealthy. That should not be confused with a lack of concern for the poor, Mr. Clinton says now.
That nuance has grown harder to communicate in recent weeks, especially as Ms. Warren has promoted her best-selling book, “A Fighting Chance,” which argues that the deck is stacked in favor of big banks and against ordinary people. A cadre of economic advisers has been helping Mr. Clinton crunch data and think about how to better frame his economic legacy — one that included a balanced budget and the creation of 22.7 million jobs — in the context of the current climate of economic populism.
The effort began early this year, when the Clintons were accused of using the swearing-in of Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York as a way to shore up their progressive credentials ahead of Mrs. Clinton’s potential 2016 campaign.
“Today, when someone talks about inequality they’re supposed to be a real left winger,” Mr. Clinton said at a book party in January. Mr. Clinton told the small crowd, which included Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland and a potential rival to Mrs. Clinton, that he had been fighting income inequality since his earliest years in Arkansas politics.
He slyly mocked critics who suggest that he had discovered the inequality issue recently, saying: " ‘Oh, look at Bill Clinton, he went to the swearing-in of Bill de Blasio. He really is slick still.’ ”
Framing his policies effectively has implications beyond Mr. Clinton’s legacy. As she decides whether to run for president in 2016, Mrs. Clinton has come under criticism from some left-leaning Democrats who view her as too cozy with Wall Street. During her 2008 bid, Mrs. Clinton had to balance promoting the economic success of her husband’s administration with distancing herself from policies less popular with Democratic primary voters, like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the deregulation of the financial industry.
Last week, dozens of labor scholars and activists, including Ralph Nader, sent Mrs. Clinton a letter asking her to use her influence with Walmart to urge the retailer to raise wages for its predominantly female work force. From 1986 to 1992, Mrs. Clinton served on the board of Walmart.
“She has been going around the country getting awards and making $200,000 per speech giving soft, cushy addresses on mother and apple pie issues,” Mr. Nader said in an interview. “It just surprises me as to why she wouldn’t come out for something so obvious.”
Mrs. Clinton did advocate raising the minimum wage at a speech in Boston last week. Burns Strider, executive director of Correct the Record, an outside group that defends Mrs. Clinton said, “Prior to it being in style to hold court on the issue of income inequality or lack-of-opportunity, Hillary Clinton was there, not just looking at the issue but taking action.”
Voters generally have a rosy view of the 1990s: Median family income increased to $48,950 in 1999 from $36,959 in 1993. And, from 1992 to 2000, unemployment fell to 7.6 percent from 14.2 percent for African-Americans and to 5.7 percent from 11.6 percent for Hispanics, according to Department of Commerce data.
“People can make their criticisms, but if you look back on the economy, people thought it was pretty darn good, especially for working-class people,” John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Mr. Clinton, and a senior adviser to President Obama, said in an interview last fall.
In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Clinton called inequality “a severe constraint on growth” and said it had not been as much of an issue in the 1990s, when incomes grew more slowly for the richest 20 percent of families than for the poorest 20 percent.
And, he said, he faced a contentious Republican-led Senate and House that would have rejected overheated talk that castigated the wealthy or focused solely on wealth redistribution. Mr. Clinton aimed to appease the other side by also devoting energy to deficit reduction and reforming the welfare system.
Al From, an adviser to Mr. Clinton who worked on his 1992 campaign, said, “We argued starting in 1991 that the progressive position ought to be that nobody who works full time in America to support a family ought to be poor.”
He added, “I’m sure he feels that he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for the economic gains that happened during his administration.”
Critics have accused Mr. Clinton of trying to be all things to all people and said that some of his policies, namely the trade agreements and legislation that allowed the commingling of commercial and investment banks, might have exacerbated the current inequality. Others point out that the Internet boom coincided with his presidency.
“You can say, ‘Oh, Clinton was lucky, he caught the tech boom.’ ‘Clinton was lucky, he came out of a recession,’ ” Mr. Clinton said on Wednesday. He pointed to a chart that showed that 7.7 million people were lifted out of poverty during his administration, compared with 77,000 during the Reagan years.
If she runs in 2016, Mrs. Clinton would confront the inequality issue from a very different place than her husband did in 1992, when he made $35,000 a year as governor of Arkansas. Back then, Mr. Clinton seemed to have a natural connection to people of modest means while his opponent, the elder President George Bush, struggled to say how much a gallon of milk cost.
On Wednesday, Mr. Clinton said he thanked God every day that “Hillary and I and some of our friends in this audience who live in New York probably pay the highest aggregate tax rates in America.”
The challenge is not about personal wealth, but policies, said Robert B. Reich, a secretary of labor under Mr. Clinton. And some policy experts argue that the era of centrist Clinton economics may have expired.
When asked by CNN last fall whether it was “the end of the Clinton Democrats,” Mr. Clinton replied: “There’s probably something to that. America is growing more liberal culturally and more diverse.”
“But, again, let’s not get carried away here,” he added. “I ran on income inequality in 1992.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
you dumb mfer. all I gotta say is,
Tech Bubble
and
how's Glass Steagall? what's that you say? you're the one that signed that big bank giveaway?
what? shit started crashing up good right after you left, then blow housing bubble to paper over the tech bubble mess?
unreal how people are allowed to rewrite history and it gets reported as truth.