Comment by stego-tech
7 days ago
It’s been our turn for a hot minute. Republicans have been blowing up the status quo since Reagan, and the Democrats enforcing austerity since Clinton. American corporate leadership is excellent at hitting quarter-after-quarter KPIs for bonuses and share price growth, but there’s ample data it has all come at the expense of workers - increased precarity, decreased wages, increased costs of everything, as the country is plundered down to its core and sold off piecemeal.
Post-Carter United States (and South Korea, and Japan, and the UK, and much of the developed world in general) is a prime example of the follies of prioritizing numbers-on-a-spreadsheet growth in the short term, over a balanced and robust domestic economic engine that ensures a healthy, happy, stable populace that wants to have kids (since they have the money and time to be good parents).
Clinton was the last fiscally responsible President, using a strong real economy to pay down some of the debt which had service costs equal to the costs of US federal debt today. You can't criticize that given how high the debt was in the 1990s.
> Clinton was the last fiscally responsible President, using a strong real economy to pay down some of the debt
The Clinton social program cuts combined with the Bush II tax cuts is what gave us the poor distributional effects of the 2001-2008 expansion, which both set the stage for and magnified the impact on all but the narrow slice at the top of the Great Recession; while they seemed harmless in the unusually strong boom economy they were implemented in, monentary nominal budget balance acheived that way has had massive adverse long term effects.
It also, contrary to your claim, didn't pay down any of the national debt, which increased by at least $100 billion every year of the Clinton presidency.
I can when he did so not through raising revenue, but by gutting social safety net programs.
If you have a debt problem, you need to both raise income and cut unnecessary spending. Clinton - and every Democrat since Carter, really - only ever did the latter, and always targeting the working class for spending cuts as opposed to the corporate or wealthy classes. God forbid we curtail subsidies to fossil fuel companies or sugar producers or big box stores with a disproportionate amount of workers on government assistance programs, god forbid we stop bailing out failed banks or bankrupt private enterprise, let’s instead make sure poor people can’t have housing and children can’t have three meals a day.
Throwing large numbers around without examining how those numbers were achieved is what politicians and despots bank on the populace trusting, because once you know how those figures are reached, you’re confronted with how the system really works and suddenly have a distaste for it.