Clinton Criticizes Economy: When I Took Office, the Distribution of American Prosperity Looks Like It Does Now

‘My first job was to get rid of it and replace it with a build out from the middle invest and growth strategy, and it worked’

Clinton Criticizes Economy: When I Took Office, the Distribution of American Prosperity Looks Like It Does Now (RealClearPolitics)

At a Politico event celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas over the weekend, former President Bill Clinton remarked American prosperity is as weak as it was when he took office in 1993.
 

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: On the substance, I just want to say a couple of things, first, when I took office, the distribution of American prosperity looked astonishingly like it does now, not as pronounced. We never had trickle-down economics ever -- before 1981. That is, we never told the American people we were going to talk really tough and act really weak, we're gonna give you whatever you want and spend whatever we wanted, and magically it would all work out and we'd have all the money in the world.

So in the first 8 years of trickle-down economics under President Reagan, we tripled the debt. And then we increased it 150% under President Bush, then he signed a bill engineered by Leon Panetta, as the Budget Chairman in the House, to go back to pay as you go, and I think it raised the gas tax a nickel or something.

And I thought it was a very brave thing for President Bush to do because the Republicans -- the Tea -- the pre-Tea Party Republicans headed by Newt Gingrich were blasting Bush. But he signed it. And it was so bad that he had to get up at the Republican convention and renounce the bill and say he would never do it again, showing how deeply-ingrained this trickle-down economics theory is.

So I thought my first job was to get rid of it and replace it with a build out from the middle invest and growth strategy, and it worked. We reduced the size of government, thanks to computers, to the smallest size since Eisenhower's last year in office. We had three surpluses, and the fourth surplus we submitted to Congress when I left, and we reduced, thanks to Al Gore's Reinventing Government initiative, tens of thousands of government regulations and all that, but we had 50% more jobs than were created under President Reagan.

It didn't work after then -- trickle-down economics never worked again -- because people thought that markets, which may be filled with Republicans didn't react well to it, and the employer community, didn't respond to it.

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