Lest we forget what the era of Bill Clinton's Presidency was like.

[kaleckim]

5. Lest we forget

him gutting social programs that decimated the poor, NAFTA, the WTO, the Telecommunications Act, him working with Gingrich to privatize Social Security (then Lewinsky broke), him gutting the New Deal financial regulations, him pushing strongly for the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, his support of mass privatizations, among other things. He did some okay things, but those things I mentioned had gigantic long term consequences. Even him basically being a deficit hawk, him creating surpluses (for some odd reason, lauded by some on the barely center-left) was pretty damaging in the long run. To claim he did anything other than further Reagan's revolution is pure revisionism. My god, he and his wife are the two people most responsible for pulling your party to the right! One of the most significant things that Sanders has done in recent years is hiring Stephanie Kelton to be a chief economic adviser. The (actual) left should read up on her and modern monetary theory (MMT). On those deficits (these articles are from actual progressives):

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-bill-clintons-balanced-budget-destroyed-the-economy-2012-9

"I think it is safe to say that we are still suffering the harmful effects of the Clinton budget surpluses," says Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City.

To understand why, you first need to understand that the components of GDP looks like this:

{GDP} = C + I + G + (X - M)

In the above equation, C is private consumption (spending). I is investment spending. G is government spending. And 'X-M' is exports-minus imports (essentially the trade surpus).

Here's a chart of the government budget around the years during and right after Clinton, in case you need a reminder that the government was in surplus near the end of his tenure.
..."If the government is in surplus, it means that the government is taking in more cash than it's spending, which is the opposite of stimulus. It's also well known that the US trade deficit exploded during the late 90s, which means that 'X-M' was also a huge drag on GDP during his years."

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/10/7521819/sanders-mmt-kelton

But new budget committee ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is poised to break dramatically from traditional Democratic views on budgeting, from Obama to Clinton to Walter Mondale and beyond. His big move: naming University of Missouri - Kansas City professor Stephanie Kelton as his chief economist. Kelton is not exactly a household name, but to those who follow economic policy debates closely, tapping her is a dramatic sign.

For years, the main disagreement between Democratic and Republican budget negotiators was about how to balance the budget — what to cut, what to tax, how fast to implement it — but not whether to balance it. Even most liberal economists agree that, in the medium-run, it's better to have less government debt rather than more. Kelton denies that premise. She thinks that, in many cases, government surpluses are actively destructive and balancing the budget is very dangerous. For example, Kelton thinks the Clinton surpluses are nothing to brag about and they actually inflicted economic damage lasting over a decade.

...Usually, when Democrats hire economists, they hire nice, respectable Keynesians, who use mainstream economic models and often agree with conservative economists on a lot of theoretical matters while drawing different policy conclusions from them. For example, Greg Mankiw, who served as George W. Bush's top economic advisor, and Christina Romer, who served as Obama's, were both influential in developing New Keynesianism, a macroeconomic theory that emerged in the 1980s and arguably dominates the field today. What really set Romer and Mankiw apart was policy, not economic theory.

...MMT emphasizes the fact that countries that print their own money can never really "run out of money." They can just print more. The reason we have taxes, then, is not to pay for stuff, but to keep people using the government's preferred currency rather than, say, Bitcoin. In some rare cases, consumer demand gets too high, so sellers raise prices and inflation ensues. Then, you need to raise taxes to cool the economy down. But the theory holds that this eventuality is pretty rare. James Galbraith, another MMT-influenced economist, once told me that the last time it happened was in World War I.

The main takeaway from this is that you really don't need to balance the budget over any time horizon, and attempts to do so will hurt the economy. That's what Kelton argues happened after the Clinton surpluses of the late 1990s / early 2000s. Any dollar of government surplus must show up as private debt, she reasons. And the private sectors just can't run up debt like that indefinitely. "Eventually, something will give," Kelton once wrote to Business Insider. "And when it does, the private sector will retrench, the economy will contract, and the government's budget will move back into deficit."

...Before recently, mainstream economists and policymakers could comfortably ignore MMT. Galbraith told me that when, on a panel for an April 2000 event at the White House, he argued that the US's new budget surplus would harm the economy, the hundreds of economists in attendance laughed in his face. That's all changed. The financial crisis created a huge appetite for new economic thinking, and MMT helped meet it. Now, people like Krugman are expected to at least grapple with its claims. Kelton's elevation to the budget committee is another important step in mainstreaming the theory, and making it safe for left-wing Democrats to embrace.