The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, ventures into a policy discussion this morning — arguably the wrong place for a fact checker. Whether policies are successful or not, particularly economic policies which are so multi-factorial, is not a straight true/false matter.
Still, Kessler does make some worthy points usually omitted from discussions of economic policy in the Clinton Administration. He is challenging Hillary Clinton’s claims about the economic expansion during her husband’s presidency. Kessler makes the point that it’s sloppy to attribute everything that happens in a huge economy like ours to a particular president since matters out of the president’s hands play a role, and because some policies take time to mature and have their effect, which often happens only after the president who initiated them is out of office. That’s true to a point, but it can also be overstated. Anyone doubt that Reagan’s reforms led to the boom? Anyone doubt that Obama’s gave given us persistent stagnation?
In any case, here is some of what’s good in Kessler’s post: He acknowledges that the balanced budgets of the 1990s were forced upon Clinton by the Republicans.
As The Washington Post editorial page put it at the time, Republicans had forced Clinton’s hand: “Mr. Clinton’s new position on the budget is much better than the old one. He should have taken it six months ago. The Republicans have driven him to say that he too wants, if not to balance the budget, at least to get the deficit into the neutral zone.”
In other words, the policy debate in Washington substantially shifted because of the GOP takeover of Congress and its embrace of a balanced-budget goal.
Kessler omits the strong growth in revenue to the treasury because Clinton agreed to cut the capital gains tax. That meant that the rich were paying MORE, but they were also spreading the wealth around by creating new businesses and jobs — something Obama explicitly declined to do in 2008.