Remembrance of Booms Past | Paul Krugman Op-ed NYT

[BootinUp]

What I like about Krugman, is he has always downplayed magic fixes to economic woes, what he is good at is analyzing trends, finding underlying explanations. He has never claimed that Bill C performed some kind of economic magic. Because of copyrights this is only a small piece of the column.

Paul Krugman MAY 23, 2016


First of all, it really was a very impressive boom, and in a way it’s odd that Democrats don’t talk about it more. After all, Republicans constantly invoke the miracles of Saint Reagan to justify their faith in supply-side economics. Yet the Clinton-era expansion surpassed the Reagan economy in every dimension. Mr. Clinton not only presided over more job creation and faster economic growth, his time in office was also marked by something notably lacking in the Reagan era: a significant rise in the real wages of ordinary workers.
But back to the boom: What was Mr. Clinton’s role? Actually, it was fairly limited, since he didn’t cause the technology takeoff. On the other hand, his policies obviously didn’t get in the way of prosperity.


One big lesson of the Clinton boom, then, is that the conclusion conservatives want you to draw from their incessant Reaganolatry — that lavishing tax cuts on the rich is the key to prosperity, and that any rise in top tax rates will bring retribution from the invisible hand — is utterly false. Mrs. Clinton is currently proposing roughly a trillion dollars in additional taxes on the top 1 percent, to pay for new programs. If she takes office, and tries to implement that policy, the usual suspects will issue the usual dire warnings, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that her agenda would hurt the economy.

The other big lesson from the Clinton I boom is that while there are many ways policy makers can and should try to raise wages, the single most important thing policy can do to help workers is aim for full employment.

Link to the Full Article NYTimes

[tonyt53]

1. Pretty much sums it up. The dot.com boom was a machine acting on its own.

It built itself on wild speculation and hung itself with the same wild speculation. But there is no doubt about it, average working people did much better under Bill than they had in a very long time.

[BootinUp]

2. kick

[fleabiscuit]

3. K&R