Democrats look beyond Clintonomics

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f19813ac-1aae-11dc-8bf0-000b5df10621.html

Democrats look beyond Clintonomics

By Krishna Guha and Edward Luce in Washington

Published: June 14 2007 22:22 | Last updated: June 14 2007 22:22

Next week Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, will join a march in Washington DC to push for a bill that would make it easier for US workers to join a trade union.

After almost seven years of George W. Bush’s presidency, the Democrats have departed from many of the economic nostrums held during the great economic boom of the 1990s presided over by Bill Clinton.

Then, the Democratic party’s priority was to reduce America’s fiscal deficit to free up capital for higher investment by the private sector. Mr Clinton was also aggressive in shrinking the size of government, and opened up foreign markets through the North America Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay Round, which led to the creation of the World Trade Organisation. The role of unions barely featured.

Today, even the economic architects of the Clinton years, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, who were successive Treasury secretaries, question much of the 1990s agenda now that the traditional link between productivity growth and wage growth appears to have broken.

Their main priorities, reflected in the campaign stances of the leading presidential contenders, are to spread the benefits of growth more widely, restore progressivity to the US tax system and maintain America’s openness to trade through policies to address its negative impact on some US workers.

“The notion that the government is too large is absurd,” Mr Summers said this week. “We all talk of the central importance of education but if paint is chipping off classroom walls, how are people supposed to believe we mean it?”

FULL article at link.

[illinoisprogressive]

1. i always hated nafta. it is the middle class who has lost

[papau]

2. Good article but why the lie that NAFTA led to the creation of the WTO? - There has been a "WTO"

since 1947 - only its name was GATT. Indeed the US Pension law was made to conform to GATT in 94 and through and including 2007 the interest rate used to calculated lump sum withdrawals is called the GATT rate.

The WTO was indeed given a birth date of January 1, 1995, but it is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947.

NAFTA had nothing to do with the existence of GATT. The 1986 Uruguay Round Agreements were concluded under the auspices of the General Agreement (GATT).

It was the Blair House accord in 94 that established the WTO - Which is an institutionalization of the multi-lateral trade agreement known as GATT. The WTO is governed by a Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years; a General Council, which implements the conference's policy decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director-general, who is appointed by the Ministerial Conference. The WTO's headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.

This article makes it seem Clinton invented that evil thing the WTO! I wonder why they try to present world trading rules as being born under Clinton.