Why Hillary's 90s Nostalgia is so dangerous.

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

Take her apparent belief that balancing the federal budget is a good way to “revitalize” an economy stuck in persistent hard times. Nostalgia might indeed suggest such a course, because that’s what Bill Clinton did in the golden 90s, and those were happy days. But more recent events have taught us a different lesson. Europe’s turn toward budget-balancing austerity after the financial crisis is what made their recession so much worse than ours. President Obama’s own quest for a budget-balancing “grand bargain” is what destroyed his presidency’s transformative potential. There is no plainer lesson from the events of recent years than the folly of austerity and the non-urgency of budget-balancing.

And deregulation! Before I watched the video of that Hillary Clinton campaign event, I had never heard someone denounce deregulation and hail the economic achievements of Bill Clinton in the same speech. That kind of mental combination, I’ve always assumed, puts you in danger of spontaneous combustion or something. After all, Bill Clinton is America’s all-time champion deregulator. He deregulated banks. He deregulated telecoms. He appointed arch deregulators Robert Rubin and Larry Summers to high office, and he re-upped Ronald Reagan’s pet Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan. He took some time out to dynamite the federal welfare system, then he came back and deregulated banks some more. And derivative securities, too.

Yes, we all know that times were good in the last few years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But unless 90s nostalgia has completely paralyzed our brains, we also know that this was due in large part to a series of financial bubbles. It is true that a different person was in the White House when the last of those bubbles exploded, but even a child understands that doesn’t get Bill Clinton entirely off the hook for it. Nor would it be a good idea to get Bill working on another Nasdaq bubble, even assuming such a thing is possible.

It all puts me in mind of a little nostalgia of my own. One of the reasons I voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton during the hopeful summer of 2008 was because I thought we needed to shut the door on the Clinton legacy once and for all. Obama won the nomination and, thanks to a global economic crisis, became president. But then he proceeded to bring back some of the very Clinton appointees that had done so much to precipitate the disaster in the first place.

Now we have Hillary’s word that the man who masterminded it all will soon be back for yet another try. What is the power these bad ideas of yore have over otherwise intelligent leaders? Hillary Clinton is a capable person, and yet it is as though she has taken no notice of what is actually happening around her in the present day. Look at where we are now: soaring inequality, a recovery that never seems to come, a fraying middle class, a furious public, and improbable protest candidates drawing millions of votes. But all of it is as nothing, I suppose, when compared to the golden allure of the past.


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/20/hillary-clinton-90s-bill-clinton-economy-thomas-frank

[highprincipleswork]

1. This is exactly correct. The methods that were questionable after Reagan are an anathema now.

We do not need the solutions of the 90's, which have never worked well for the average person to satisfy the needs of today.

In fact, we are in this position exactly because we have been flirting with 90's methods ever since Bill Clinton and others came up with them then. They were not Progressive, they were not effective, they were like a bad drug that took a long time to take effect. In fact, the current major catastrophe with our mass media can be directly traced to The Telecommunications Act, our financial meltdown in 2008 to the deregulation of Wall Street, and the loss of millions of jobs to NAFTA. These were all the product of this 1990's wrongheaded, conciliatory approach to Ronald Reagan and his also devastatingly bad ideas.

Hillary seems to be balking at continuing her Progressive talk during the debates and veering back to a dreamy remembrance of the 90's economy which was held up by the dot.com bubble, not by these terrible, terrible policies.

Hoping against hope that Democrats everywhere wake up and smell the coffee.

Donald Trump is a post-Reagan candidate, and he is going to clean our clock if we go regressive instead of Progressive.

[tonyt53]

2. The author is a writer, not an economist. An no, those bubbles didn't do it.

The economy was improving at the beginning of his second year in office. Those bubbles came about mid way thought his second term.

[jeff47]

4. Nope.

As someone who started in my career due to the dot-com bubble, I assure you that was running long before 1998.

[guillaumeb]

3. The fiction that the William Clinton Presidency was some sort of great time

cannot be explained by what actually happened. A large part of the reason for the economic activity was the cheap and relatively available home equity loans fueling a spending binge. When the Ponzi scheme that was the real estate market collapsed the economic activity collapsed also.

The fact that people were using these equity loans to support their spending points to the Clinton era as being a bad time for the bottom 90%.

But for the Clintons themselves, the Clinton Presidency was what allowed them to make millions by giving speeches to the very financial thieves that ruined the economy.

[Retrograde]

6. It was a boom time in Silicon Valley

the company I worked for sold shovels for that dot.com goldrush, and I was lucky to cash out before the 2001 crash, so for me they were great times.

It may not seem so now, looking at a 65+ year old Secretary Clinton, but it was also a time of youthful optimism: Bill Clinton was the first Baby Boomer president, someone who did not have personal memories of the great depression or WWII. We weren't looking for wars to fight, as the US did under Bush I. The world wasn't perfect, of course, but there was some sense of optimism. The GOP hated him, though, and spend a lot of time and money looking under every rock until they found a tenuous reason to impeach him.

Yeah, they parlayed their White House years into a lot of money - like the vulgarians the old-money people like the Bushes accused them of being. But Clinton was a decent senator for New York - and made a point of actually visiting all parts of the state, something her predecessor didn't do. Disagree with her positions and her approach, but she does work hard.

[JaneyVee]

5. The people who are nostalgic about FDR days are chiming in?

Yikes.

[guillaumeb]

8. Perhaps you could "explain" again abut the permanent underclass?

what a grotesque, Libertarian bit of heartlessness that was.

[Cheese Sandwich]

7. rec