I never thought I’d see the day, but a well-known Republican has admitted that Bill Clinton’s presidency wasn’t as bad as conservatives make it out to be. Be still my heart.
Former White House and Treasury official Bruce Bartlett, who worked for Reagan and H. W. Bush, had an op-ed in today’s New York Times in which he argued that his fellow conservatives should “rethink” Clinton’s presidency.
At least on economic policy, there is much to praise and little to criticize in terms of what was actually done (or not done) on his watch.
Bringing the federal budget into surplus is obviously an achievement. After inheriting a deficit of 4.7 percent of gross domestic product in 1992, Mr. Clinton turned this into a surplus of 2.4 percent of G.D.P. in 2000 — a remarkable turnaround that can be appreciated by realizing that this year’s deficit, as large as it is, will reach only 4.2 percent of G.D.P., according to the Congressional Budget Office.
More important, from a conservative point of view, Mr. Clinton achieved his surplus in large part by curtailing spending. Federal spending fell to 18.4 percent of G.D.P. in 2000 from 22.2 percent in 1992. Although he raised taxes in 1993, he cut them in 1997. He even reduced the capital gains tax — something his predecessor, George H. W. Bush, tried but failed to accomplish.
Although much of the budgetary savings came from lower defense spending and reduced interest on the debt, entitlement spending also fell to 10.6 percent of G.D.P. in 2000 from 11.5 percent in 1992. Mr. Clinton signed welfare reform into law in 1996, the only time in American history when an entitlement program was abolished. By virtually all accounts, welfare reform has been a success.
Mr. Clinton was also steadfast in his support for free trade. It is doubtful that anyone else could have persuaded Congress to approve the North American Free Trade Agreement. On monetary policy, he reappointed Alan Greenspan, a Republican, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, thereby helping to bring inflation down to its lowest sustained level in a generation.
As if this weren’t shocking enough, Bartlett even contrasts Clinton’s policies with that of his successor — and finds that Clinton excels in the comparison.
By contrast, Mr. Clinton’s Republican successor has caused the surplus to evaporate, raised total federal spending by 1.6 percent of G.D.P., established a new entitlement program for prescription drugs and adopted the most protectionist trade policy since Herbert Hoover. While President Bush has done other things that conservatives view more favorably, like cutting taxes, there is no getting around the reality that Mr. Clinton was better in many respects.
Read that last sentence again. It makes me wonder if ol’ Bruce Bartlett has been the victim of identity theft. Indeed, I wouldn’t want to be in his home this morning. (“Honey, Karl Rove left a message for you. He sounded kind of angry…”)
And as long as we’re talking about the Big Dog and his record, the LA Times’ Ron Brownstein had a great column earlier this week in which he bucked the media trend by downplaying the Lewinsky scandal and noting Clinton’s historic achievements.
[Clinton’s] domestic program helped to produce the most widely shared economic boom since the 1960s…. To conservative critics, the Clinton era was “a time of domesticity, triviality and self-absorption,” as Krauthammer wrote last week. Maybe it looked that way from the penthouse. But the Clinton years produced extraordinary gains in the communities that needed help most.
The benefits of the Clinton boom were dispersed far more broadly than the gains under Ronald Reagan, in part because Clinton systematically implemented policies that encouraged and rewarded work for those on the economy’s bottom rungs.
Consider the scorecard. During Clinton’s two terms, the median income for American families increased by a solid 15% after inflation, according to Census Bureau figures. But it rose even faster for African Americans (33%) and Hispanics (24%) than it did for whites (14%).
The growth was so widely shared that from 1993 through 1999, families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution saw their incomes increase faster than those in the top 5%. By comparison, under President Reagan in the 1980s, those in the top 5% increased their income more than five times faster than the bottom 20%.
Likewise, the poverty rate under Clinton fell 25%, the biggest eight-year decline since the 1960s. It fell even faster for particularly vulnerable groups like blacks, Hispanics and children. Again the contrast with Reagan is striking. During Reagan’s two terms, the number of Americans in poverty fell by just 77,000. During Clinton’s two terms, the number of Americans in poverty plummeted by 8.1 million. The number of children in poverty fell by 50,000 under Reagan. Under Clinton the number was 4.1 million. That’s a ratio of 80 to 1.
Brownstein also noted Clinton’s success in eliminating the federal deficit, passing welfare reform, increasing the minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit, and creating the Children’s Health Insurance Program. He even noted that Clinton warned Bush after the 2000 election that al Qaeda would be his top national security challenge (advice which Bush chose to ignore).
It’s nice to see the guy get some positive press for a change.