eg8r
10-06-2003, 12:37 PM
This is a long quote (and not nearly everything) so feel free to skip it if you would like. /ccboard/images/graemlins/smile.gif I am posting this because for some reason, Q thinks the latest recession is Bush's fault. He also for some reason does not understand the difference between deficit and recession. No one argues that Bush is a big spender and should be controlled a little better, but he is pulling us out of the horrible economy that Clinton left for us. Below is a quote from the iconoclast website.
For all the naysayers, I have included at the end, the few "good" things that Clinton did in office as it pertains to the economy (funny that each one was helped along by the Republicans).
<blockquote><font class="small">Quote Iconoclast:</font><hr>As the economy in 2003 struggles to regain its footing, after the bursting of the Clinton bubble at the turn of the century and the trauma of the 2001 recession, Americans are currently paying a steep price -- in terms of reduced output, sluggish growth, and lost jobs -- for Clinton's misconceived policies and unfortunate actions. We are likely to be doing so for years to come.
The bill of particulars for Clinton's economic mismanagement includes:
<ul type="square"> a crippling increase in marginal income tax rates 10 years ago that remains the single greatest impediment to economic recovery today, despite the recent modest partial rate rollback;<br>
further legislative actions inimical to saving, investment, and job creation; <br>
systematic abuse of the regulatory mechanism, including the use of executive orders and litigation to mount an unprecedented assault on the property rights of businesses and individuals; and<br>
a pervasive undermining of the rule of law by the executive branch that severely damaged the moral and ethical tone of American life and spilled over into the business climate, with unhappy results for the economy.
[/list]
Let's examine each of these factors in more detail.
<font color="#000080">Taxing Productive Activity </font color>
A key element of Ronald Reagan's rescue of the US economy in the 1980s was the sharp reduction of marginal federal income tax rates, which dropped from 70% in the top bracket to 28% by the time Reagan left office in 1989. Regrettably, George H.W. Bush subsequently agreed to raise that rate to 31% in the disastrous 1990 tax hike that prolonged and deepened the 1990-91 recession and probably cost him the 1992 election.
The Clinton tax hike of 1993 was actually more severe, but the timing was more propitious. It occurred during the extended recovery that had begun on Bush Sr.'s watch in March 1991 and that conveniently served to mask much of the detrimental impact of the Clinton tax increase on business activity -- until the next cyclical downturn made it clear how much that tax increase had weakened the economic structure and the incentive to participate in productive endeavors. The 1993 legislation retroactively raised personal income taxes and elevated the top marginal income tax rate by more than eight additional percentage points to a whopping 39.6% -- almost half again as high as the level under Reagan.
The effects were ultimately devastating. As its name implies, the income tax is levied not on accumulated wealth (a "tax on the rich," as the press often portrays it), but on productive pursuits -- including work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurial risk. All else remaining equal, the more you tax something, the less you get of it. Decisions are usually made at the margin, and decisions to undertake additional productive economic activity are strongly influenced by the marginal tax rate applied to the income this activity generates. This is true in prosperity as well as recession, but the effects are less noticeable while opportunities are plentiful to earn more income, even if the government takes a bigger bite out of it. Thus, the disincentive effects of the massive tax increase -- occurring during the economic boom that Clinton inherited -- were less noticeable in the early 1990s than after the hard times finally came around at the end of the decade and the diminished incentives to engage in productive activity began to bite.
Supporters of Clinton will argue that his tax increase helped to balance the federal budget and create the surpluses of the late 1990s. But this is a dubious claim that ignores the feedback effects of tax-rate changes on the tax base (i.e., on taxable income) -- witness the real decline in personal income tax revenues following Bush Sr.'s 1990 tax rate hike. It's likely that over the years, Clinton's 1993 tax increase was essentially a wash in terms of federal revenues, as the erosion of the tax base from the disincentives of higher marginal rates offset much of the revenue-raising potential of those higher rates.
The fact is that the federal budget was balanced in the late 1990s as a result of two principal forces, neither of which had anything to do with the policies of Bill Clinton -- the growing economy that carried over from the Reagan years, and the spending limitations put into place under Bush Sr. and reinforced in subsequent years by the Republican Congress.
In fact, the Clinton administration and the Congressional Budget Office continually projected large deficits throughout his term in office, and they were as surprised as anyone when the strong economy coupled with spending caps produced the unexpected surpluses.
<font color="#000080">More Bad Acts</font color>
Injurious as it was, the heavier tax burden was not the only source of the damage that occurred to the economic structure under Clinton. Other items on his legislative agenda were enacted that placed a further burden on businesses and served to deter job creation -- both during his term in office and in the subsequent recession and anemic recovery. These items include the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. In the past, arrangements for workers in the private sector to take time off for personal reasons had traditionally been left to employers and employees to work out between themselves -- either through collective bargaining or through individual agreements on a case-by-case basis. Under Clinton's legislation, they became a government mandate and an expensive new entitlement. Whatever its merits, the new law clearly imposed an extra burden on businesses, raising the cost of hiring and maintaining an adequate work force and jeopardizing existing and future jobs.
An additional job killer was the increased minimum wage, which rose by 21% to $5.15 an hour during Clinton's term in office. Humanitarian as it may sound to mandate higher entry-level wages, the effects are invariably perverse. Employers cannot afford to pay workers more than their value added for any length of time, and it's a reasonably settled proposition in economics that over the years, businesses inevitably adjust their labor/capital mix to reflect higher relative labor costs. A large number of entry-level jobs are likely to disappear within a few years after the government raises the minimum wage, especially when the business cycle turns down and each worker generates less additional revenue. Thus, after predictable lags, the higher minimum wage serves to cut off the bottom rung of the employment ladder for the young and the poor and new entrants to the labor force who, over time, find their job opportunities substantially reduced. This clearly occurred as the 20th century drew to a close, and it is one of the reasons why the economic recovery has so far failed to generate a resurgence in employment.
Taken together, the combined burden of Clinton's tax increase and higher mandated costs fell most heavily on small businesses, which typically produce a high proportion of US goods and services and are usually responsible for creating the majority of new jobs in the economy. The added burden has severely limited their ability and incentive to add workers during the recovery from the recent recession. For example, a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York concludes that in contrast to earlier recessions and previous "jobless recoveries," the current episode is characterized to a much greater degree by the permanent destruction of jobs rather than temporary layoffs. In my view, there is little doubt that a major cause of this situation was the legislation enacted under the Clinton administration that made it more and more expensive to hire and retain workers and that encouraged the substitution of capital for labor -- a conclusion supported by recent productivity data reflecting that substitution.
Finally, it is worth mentioning one more damaging piece of legislation of the early Clinton years that affects you most severely if you are a US senior citizen (or plan to become one some day): the 1993 Social Security "reform" that provided for taxing up to 85% of your benefits above a certain low threshold. Of course, this is not really a tax on the benefits -- it's a tax based upon the other income you earn, including otherwise "tax-exempt" interest income, that puts you above the threshold. In other words, it's an additional tax on the income generated from a lifetime of saving as well as from current productive activity, and it clearly has a negative effect on the personal savings rate -- and thus on business investment -- as well as on labor force participation.
<font color="#000080">Regulatory Abuse</font color>
Clinton came to power at a time when the US economy was in excellent health and needed no assistance from the government to keep it running. It was already taking care of itself rather nicely, generating rapid growth in output and employment with inflation squeezed out of the system. But the activist new president couldn't leave well enough alone, and he presided over an energetic administration brimming with some really bad ideas about how to "fix" an economy that wasn't broken. Among the more bizarre proposals were the nationalization of healthcare, a BTU (energy) tax that would probably have choked off the recovery then and there, and the introduction of "industrial policy" -- Japanese-style government-directed resource allocation of the kind that has helped to produce a decade of stagnation in that once-healthy Asian economy.
Fortunately, these proposals were all shot down, mostly in the Democratic Congress of 1993-94. And the ensuing Republican control of the House of Representatives ensured that Gridlock would continue to thwart the most damaging ideas emanating from the restless spirits in the executive branch. Indeed, the Gridlock of the 1990s is one of the Four Gs (<i>see Part One of this series below</i>) to which I attribute the prosperity of that era -- to the extent it resulted from the electorate's antipathy to Clinton's overreaching, his political ineptitude inadvertently helped to save the economy from the worst ideas of his own administration. This development also paved the way for the enactment into law of such GOP proposals as further federal spending limitations, welfare reform, and a cut in the capital gains tax -- good ideas that were forced upon Clinton by Congressional Republicans and that helped the economy to continue prospering during his presidency.
Unfortunately, the thwarting of Clinton's legislative initiatives may have served to encourage him to turn to other means to further his economic agenda, giving rise to the Clinton-sanctioned regulatory abuse that did considerable long-lasting damage to the economy and almost certainly contributed to the sluggish business climate and absence of job creation of the last three years. Even as Bill Clinton grandly (and absurdly) proclaimed that the "era of big government is over" in his 1995 State of the Union Address, his administration kept right on loading bigger and more onerous regulatory and redistributive intrusions onto the backs of businesses large and small.
Under Clinton, few areas of private life -- in the workplace, the environment, health and safety, or anywhere else -- were exempt from the intrusion of big government. When legislation was forestalled and regulation would not suffice or was not quick enough to suit his purposes, Clinton ruled by executive order -- unilaterally trampling on individual rights, property rights and states' rights in the areas of environmentalism, affirmative action, emergency powers, and Internet regulation, among others. It's doubtful that he -- or the White House counsel or even the Justice Department -- ever gave a moment's thought to the dubious or nonexistent Constitutional authority for these actions.
<font color="#000080">The Rule Of Law</font color>
In a similar disregard for Constitutional authority and the climate of doing business in the United States, the Clinton White House and Justice Department repeatedly engaged in litigious attacks on American companies and industries -- making war on tobacco, guns, Microsoft, and any number of other juicy targets. The administration attempted to put the tobacco industry under the thumb of the Food & Drug Administration; and other politically unpopular businesses found themselves stripped of traditional legal rights as the executive branch joined with, or actively supported, the predatory plaintiff bar in pursuing abusive, extortionist litigation. While the effects can't be easily quantified, the increased burden on business stemming from the oppressive legal and regulatory climate of the 1990s is almost certainly one of the major impediments to a robust recovery at the current time.
Also difficult to quantify is the impact on the business climate of the Clinton administration's repeated attempts to cover up its many and varied scandals and thwart investigations, it's wanton disregard of almost every provision of the Bill of Rights, and its frequent assaults on property rights and economic liberty. In my view, these have had the cumulative effect of further damaging the rule of law and eroding the indispensable institutions of civil society that make it possible to conduct business and participate in market activity.
The high-flying, zoom-and-boom, lie-and-cheat, get-rich-quick bubble economy of the Clinton era didn't occur in a vacuum. The fish rots from the head, and so does the moral tone and ethical climate in which individuals and businesses make decisions. The fraudulent and criminal activity that corporations, accounting firms, and their executives engaged in can never be justified or blamed on society, and they need to be prosecuted in the civil and criminal courts to the bitter end and the miscreants appropriately punished. But it can't be ignored that all of these depredations occurred in the context of a national climate conditioned by corruption and scandal at the very top of political society. Few if any corporate scandals approaching this magnitude occurred during the so-called "decade of greed" of the 1980s, a period that looks positively innocent in light of the anything-goes atmosphere of the 1990s, which from the top (including both Clintons) on down may well earn a place in history as the "decade of thieves."
<font color="#000080">What Clinton (Reluctantly Or Inadvertently) Did Right</font color>
Still, the 1990s will be remembered as a period of relative prosperity, and it is worthwhile to ask whether Clinton deserves any credit at all for that achievement. The answer is a qualified "yes, but." Despite the overwhelming negatives discussed above, I can suggest four areas in which Clinton grudgingly or unintentionally made a positive contribution to the economic success of his era:
1. Clinton's reappointment of a Republican holdover, Alan Greenspan, to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board. Clinton's more-rational advisers from the financial community and economics profession apparently prevailed in this instance, and we may all be thankful that this was one of the few cases where he was willing to let well enough alone.
2. Clinton's inability to get two of his major economic initiatives enacted during his first term. These were the stimulus package and the health plan, either of which could have torpedoed the noninflationary economic recovery that began in March 1991 under Bush Sr. And as noted above, to the extent that Clinton's policies led to his party's loss of the House of Representatives and the advent of divided government, we can give him further credit for the political gridlock that forestalled passage of much of his proposed legislation that would have been highly detrimental to the economy.
3. Clinton's reluctant and belated support of trade agreements initiated by his Republican predecessors. These included the North American Free Trade Agreement and legislation paving the way for US participation in the new World Trade Organization. These initiatives are still controversial, but whatever their flaws, most economists would agree that they have helped to move the regional and world economies in the direction of free and open international trade.
4. Clinton's reluctant acceptance of major Republican initiatives after his party lost full control of the legislative branch. Such legislation as welfare reform, a tax cut on capital gains, and spending restrictions may have been forced on him by the opposition party, but in the end he signed them and grabbed the credit, even as he helped to make Gingrich's "Contract With America" a reality.
<hr /></blockquote>
Here is the article (http://www.iconoclast.ca/MainPage.asp?page=/newPage20.asp) This section was taken from a section down the page.
eg8r
For all the naysayers, I have included at the end, the few "good" things that Clinton did in office as it pertains to the economy (funny that each one was helped along by the Republicans).
<blockquote><font class="small">Quote Iconoclast:</font><hr>As the economy in 2003 struggles to regain its footing, after the bursting of the Clinton bubble at the turn of the century and the trauma of the 2001 recession, Americans are currently paying a steep price -- in terms of reduced output, sluggish growth, and lost jobs -- for Clinton's misconceived policies and unfortunate actions. We are likely to be doing so for years to come.
The bill of particulars for Clinton's economic mismanagement includes:
<ul type="square"> a crippling increase in marginal income tax rates 10 years ago that remains the single greatest impediment to economic recovery today, despite the recent modest partial rate rollback;<br>
further legislative actions inimical to saving, investment, and job creation; <br>
systematic abuse of the regulatory mechanism, including the use of executive orders and litigation to mount an unprecedented assault on the property rights of businesses and individuals; and<br>
a pervasive undermining of the rule of law by the executive branch that severely damaged the moral and ethical tone of American life and spilled over into the business climate, with unhappy results for the economy.
[/list]
Let's examine each of these factors in more detail.
<font color="#000080">Taxing Productive Activity </font color>
A key element of Ronald Reagan's rescue of the US economy in the 1980s was the sharp reduction of marginal federal income tax rates, which dropped from 70% in the top bracket to 28% by the time Reagan left office in 1989. Regrettably, George H.W. Bush subsequently agreed to raise that rate to 31% in the disastrous 1990 tax hike that prolonged and deepened the 1990-91 recession and probably cost him the 1992 election.
The Clinton tax hike of 1993 was actually more severe, but the timing was more propitious. It occurred during the extended recovery that had begun on Bush Sr.'s watch in March 1991 and that conveniently served to mask much of the detrimental impact of the Clinton tax increase on business activity -- until the next cyclical downturn made it clear how much that tax increase had weakened the economic structure and the incentive to participate in productive endeavors. The 1993 legislation retroactively raised personal income taxes and elevated the top marginal income tax rate by more than eight additional percentage points to a whopping 39.6% -- almost half again as high as the level under Reagan.
The effects were ultimately devastating. As its name implies, the income tax is levied not on accumulated wealth (a "tax on the rich," as the press often portrays it), but on productive pursuits -- including work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurial risk. All else remaining equal, the more you tax something, the less you get of it. Decisions are usually made at the margin, and decisions to undertake additional productive economic activity are strongly influenced by the marginal tax rate applied to the income this activity generates. This is true in prosperity as well as recession, but the effects are less noticeable while opportunities are plentiful to earn more income, even if the government takes a bigger bite out of it. Thus, the disincentive effects of the massive tax increase -- occurring during the economic boom that Clinton inherited -- were less noticeable in the early 1990s than after the hard times finally came around at the end of the decade and the diminished incentives to engage in productive activity began to bite.
Supporters of Clinton will argue that his tax increase helped to balance the federal budget and create the surpluses of the late 1990s. But this is a dubious claim that ignores the feedback effects of tax-rate changes on the tax base (i.e., on taxable income) -- witness the real decline in personal income tax revenues following Bush Sr.'s 1990 tax rate hike. It's likely that over the years, Clinton's 1993 tax increase was essentially a wash in terms of federal revenues, as the erosion of the tax base from the disincentives of higher marginal rates offset much of the revenue-raising potential of those higher rates.
The fact is that the federal budget was balanced in the late 1990s as a result of two principal forces, neither of which had anything to do with the policies of Bill Clinton -- the growing economy that carried over from the Reagan years, and the spending limitations put into place under Bush Sr. and reinforced in subsequent years by the Republican Congress.
In fact, the Clinton administration and the Congressional Budget Office continually projected large deficits throughout his term in office, and they were as surprised as anyone when the strong economy coupled with spending caps produced the unexpected surpluses.
<font color="#000080">More Bad Acts</font color>
Injurious as it was, the heavier tax burden was not the only source of the damage that occurred to the economic structure under Clinton. Other items on his legislative agenda were enacted that placed a further burden on businesses and served to deter job creation -- both during his term in office and in the subsequent recession and anemic recovery. These items include the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. In the past, arrangements for workers in the private sector to take time off for personal reasons had traditionally been left to employers and employees to work out between themselves -- either through collective bargaining or through individual agreements on a case-by-case basis. Under Clinton's legislation, they became a government mandate and an expensive new entitlement. Whatever its merits, the new law clearly imposed an extra burden on businesses, raising the cost of hiring and maintaining an adequate work force and jeopardizing existing and future jobs.
An additional job killer was the increased minimum wage, which rose by 21% to $5.15 an hour during Clinton's term in office. Humanitarian as it may sound to mandate higher entry-level wages, the effects are invariably perverse. Employers cannot afford to pay workers more than their value added for any length of time, and it's a reasonably settled proposition in economics that over the years, businesses inevitably adjust their labor/capital mix to reflect higher relative labor costs. A large number of entry-level jobs are likely to disappear within a few years after the government raises the minimum wage, especially when the business cycle turns down and each worker generates less additional revenue. Thus, after predictable lags, the higher minimum wage serves to cut off the bottom rung of the employment ladder for the young and the poor and new entrants to the labor force who, over time, find their job opportunities substantially reduced. This clearly occurred as the 20th century drew to a close, and it is one of the reasons why the economic recovery has so far failed to generate a resurgence in employment.
Taken together, the combined burden of Clinton's tax increase and higher mandated costs fell most heavily on small businesses, which typically produce a high proportion of US goods and services and are usually responsible for creating the majority of new jobs in the economy. The added burden has severely limited their ability and incentive to add workers during the recovery from the recent recession. For example, a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York concludes that in contrast to earlier recessions and previous "jobless recoveries," the current episode is characterized to a much greater degree by the permanent destruction of jobs rather than temporary layoffs. In my view, there is little doubt that a major cause of this situation was the legislation enacted under the Clinton administration that made it more and more expensive to hire and retain workers and that encouraged the substitution of capital for labor -- a conclusion supported by recent productivity data reflecting that substitution.
Finally, it is worth mentioning one more damaging piece of legislation of the early Clinton years that affects you most severely if you are a US senior citizen (or plan to become one some day): the 1993 Social Security "reform" that provided for taxing up to 85% of your benefits above a certain low threshold. Of course, this is not really a tax on the benefits -- it's a tax based upon the other income you earn, including otherwise "tax-exempt" interest income, that puts you above the threshold. In other words, it's an additional tax on the income generated from a lifetime of saving as well as from current productive activity, and it clearly has a negative effect on the personal savings rate -- and thus on business investment -- as well as on labor force participation.
<font color="#000080">Regulatory Abuse</font color>
Clinton came to power at a time when the US economy was in excellent health and needed no assistance from the government to keep it running. It was already taking care of itself rather nicely, generating rapid growth in output and employment with inflation squeezed out of the system. But the activist new president couldn't leave well enough alone, and he presided over an energetic administration brimming with some really bad ideas about how to "fix" an economy that wasn't broken. Among the more bizarre proposals were the nationalization of healthcare, a BTU (energy) tax that would probably have choked off the recovery then and there, and the introduction of "industrial policy" -- Japanese-style government-directed resource allocation of the kind that has helped to produce a decade of stagnation in that once-healthy Asian economy.
Fortunately, these proposals were all shot down, mostly in the Democratic Congress of 1993-94. And the ensuing Republican control of the House of Representatives ensured that Gridlock would continue to thwart the most damaging ideas emanating from the restless spirits in the executive branch. Indeed, the Gridlock of the 1990s is one of the Four Gs (<i>see Part One of this series below</i>) to which I attribute the prosperity of that era -- to the extent it resulted from the electorate's antipathy to Clinton's overreaching, his political ineptitude inadvertently helped to save the economy from the worst ideas of his own administration. This development also paved the way for the enactment into law of such GOP proposals as further federal spending limitations, welfare reform, and a cut in the capital gains tax -- good ideas that were forced upon Clinton by Congressional Republicans and that helped the economy to continue prospering during his presidency.
Unfortunately, the thwarting of Clinton's legislative initiatives may have served to encourage him to turn to other means to further his economic agenda, giving rise to the Clinton-sanctioned regulatory abuse that did considerable long-lasting damage to the economy and almost certainly contributed to the sluggish business climate and absence of job creation of the last three years. Even as Bill Clinton grandly (and absurdly) proclaimed that the "era of big government is over" in his 1995 State of the Union Address, his administration kept right on loading bigger and more onerous regulatory and redistributive intrusions onto the backs of businesses large and small.
Under Clinton, few areas of private life -- in the workplace, the environment, health and safety, or anywhere else -- were exempt from the intrusion of big government. When legislation was forestalled and regulation would not suffice or was not quick enough to suit his purposes, Clinton ruled by executive order -- unilaterally trampling on individual rights, property rights and states' rights in the areas of environmentalism, affirmative action, emergency powers, and Internet regulation, among others. It's doubtful that he -- or the White House counsel or even the Justice Department -- ever gave a moment's thought to the dubious or nonexistent Constitutional authority for these actions.
<font color="#000080">The Rule Of Law</font color>
In a similar disregard for Constitutional authority and the climate of doing business in the United States, the Clinton White House and Justice Department repeatedly engaged in litigious attacks on American companies and industries -- making war on tobacco, guns, Microsoft, and any number of other juicy targets. The administration attempted to put the tobacco industry under the thumb of the Food & Drug Administration; and other politically unpopular businesses found themselves stripped of traditional legal rights as the executive branch joined with, or actively supported, the predatory plaintiff bar in pursuing abusive, extortionist litigation. While the effects can't be easily quantified, the increased burden on business stemming from the oppressive legal and regulatory climate of the 1990s is almost certainly one of the major impediments to a robust recovery at the current time.
Also difficult to quantify is the impact on the business climate of the Clinton administration's repeated attempts to cover up its many and varied scandals and thwart investigations, it's wanton disregard of almost every provision of the Bill of Rights, and its frequent assaults on property rights and economic liberty. In my view, these have had the cumulative effect of further damaging the rule of law and eroding the indispensable institutions of civil society that make it possible to conduct business and participate in market activity.
The high-flying, zoom-and-boom, lie-and-cheat, get-rich-quick bubble economy of the Clinton era didn't occur in a vacuum. The fish rots from the head, and so does the moral tone and ethical climate in which individuals and businesses make decisions. The fraudulent and criminal activity that corporations, accounting firms, and their executives engaged in can never be justified or blamed on society, and they need to be prosecuted in the civil and criminal courts to the bitter end and the miscreants appropriately punished. But it can't be ignored that all of these depredations occurred in the context of a national climate conditioned by corruption and scandal at the very top of political society. Few if any corporate scandals approaching this magnitude occurred during the so-called "decade of greed" of the 1980s, a period that looks positively innocent in light of the anything-goes atmosphere of the 1990s, which from the top (including both Clintons) on down may well earn a place in history as the "decade of thieves."
<font color="#000080">What Clinton (Reluctantly Or Inadvertently) Did Right</font color>
Still, the 1990s will be remembered as a period of relative prosperity, and it is worthwhile to ask whether Clinton deserves any credit at all for that achievement. The answer is a qualified "yes, but." Despite the overwhelming negatives discussed above, I can suggest four areas in which Clinton grudgingly or unintentionally made a positive contribution to the economic success of his era:
1. Clinton's reappointment of a Republican holdover, Alan Greenspan, to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board. Clinton's more-rational advisers from the financial community and economics profession apparently prevailed in this instance, and we may all be thankful that this was one of the few cases where he was willing to let well enough alone.
2. Clinton's inability to get two of his major economic initiatives enacted during his first term. These were the stimulus package and the health plan, either of which could have torpedoed the noninflationary economic recovery that began in March 1991 under Bush Sr. And as noted above, to the extent that Clinton's policies led to his party's loss of the House of Representatives and the advent of divided government, we can give him further credit for the political gridlock that forestalled passage of much of his proposed legislation that would have been highly detrimental to the economy.
3. Clinton's reluctant and belated support of trade agreements initiated by his Republican predecessors. These included the North American Free Trade Agreement and legislation paving the way for US participation in the new World Trade Organization. These initiatives are still controversial, but whatever their flaws, most economists would agree that they have helped to move the regional and world economies in the direction of free and open international trade.
4. Clinton's reluctant acceptance of major Republican initiatives after his party lost full control of the legislative branch. Such legislation as welfare reform, a tax cut on capital gains, and spending restrictions may have been forced on him by the opposition party, but in the end he signed them and grabbed the credit, even as he helped to make Gingrich's "Contract With America" a reality.
<hr /></blockquote>
Here is the article (http://www.iconoclast.ca/MainPage.asp?page=/newPage20.asp) This section was taken from a section down the page.
eg8r