Clintonomics: a Reappraisal The Hollow Boom By ROBERT POLLIN [ "Watch what we do, not what we say." -- John Mitchell, Attorney General under President Richard Nixon
"It's the economy stupid," was the one memorable slogan to have emerged out of Bill Clinton's successful first run at the Presidency in 1992, and it became the overarching theme of his full eight years in office. Clinton came into office pledging to end the economic stagnation that that had enveloped the last two years of the Bush-1 administration and advance a program of "Putting People First" through large investments in job training, education, and rebuilding the country's public infrastructure.
But Clinton's economic program changed drastically even during the two-month interregnum between his November election and his inauguration in January 1993, as Bob Woodward of the Washington Post documented in compelling detail in his first Washington insider book on economic policy, The Agenda. As reported by Woodward, Clinton himself acknowledged only weeks after winning the election that "We're Eisenhower Republicans here.We stand for lower deficits, free trade, and the bond market. Isn't that great?" Clinton further conceded during this same time period that with his new policy focus "we help the bond market and we hurt the people who voted us in."
Clinton never abandoned the idea that "it's the economy stupid" should remain the watchwords of his Presidency. It was just that the "Putting People First" agenda of his 1992 campaign would have to yield top priority to the prerogatives of the financial markets and the wealthy. How could Clinton have undergone such a lightening reversal from the program on which he was elected to office? The answer was straightforward, and explained with unvarnished candor by Robert Rubin, who had been Co-Chair of the premier Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs before joining the Clinton administration and who was to become Clinton's most influential economic advisor and Treasury Secretary. Still during the interregnum before Clinton's first inauguration, Rubin pointed out to members of the more populist camp within the newly forming administration that the rich "are running the economy and make the decisions about the economy."
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The central point is that, as we have seen, wage gains for average workers during the Clinton boom remained historically weak, especially in relationship to the ascent of productivity (see Figure 2.1 and Table 2.7). These facts provide the basis for the poll findings reported in Business Week at the end of 1999 that substantial majorities of US citizens expressed acute dissatisfaction with various features of their economic situation. For example, 51 percent of American workers interviewed by the magazine declared that they 'felt cheated by their employer'. When asked their view of what Business Week termed the 'current productivity boom', 63 percent said that the boom has not raised their earnings, and 62 percent that it had not improved their job security. Such negative popular reactions are striking, given the persistent portrayal by the media of the Clinton economy as a time of unparalleled prosperity.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/pollin10182003.html
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
