One can certainly raise various critiques of Clinton's presidency, many of which I'd wholeheartedly agree with, but in broad strokes his economic program would seem to have been a tremendous success, particularly for the working poor. (Although the wealthy certainly also fared well under his presidency; growth in income was remarkably evenly distributed between all income classes under Clinton).
Indeed. The writer? Nate Silver. How will the CDSers, many of whom have expressed undying devotion to Silver, treat him now?
Silver is now engaged in a pi**ing contest with my friend (and inveterate CDSer) David Sirota. When you stick to the facts (as opposed to the name calling, Silver should drop the silly "Sirota is a Marxist" nonsense and Sirota should drop the "University of Chicago" ad hom), Silver wins this argument on the facts. For example, in a followup post, Silver writes:
Under Clinton, by contrast, the economy was a rising tide that lifted all boats. The poor, finally, did quite well for themselves, their incomes appreciating at about 2.5 percent annually, but the rich did just about as well -- in fact, the rich did better under Clinton than they had under Reagan and Bush. The rich/poor gap, if measured as a ratio, did not increase appreciably under Clinton. The 10th percentile saw their incomes increase by about 17 percent during his tenure, and so did the 90th percentile.
. . . For my money, the Clintonan idea of "aggressive" pro-growth policies coupled with a relatively high tax rate on the rich is an attractive one. Let the rich make their money and then tax them (and/or improve social welfare programs for the poor). But don't do things that inhibit economic growth because you're afraid of the redistributive effects. A good example is something like free trade. The emerging consensus among both liberal and conservative economists appears to be that while free trade does increase GDP (as has long been believed), it also has some redistributive effects; the "consensus" solution to this is to have free trade coupled with a more robust safety net.
. . . The other potential lesson from the Clinton record, which I've argued may also be observable in the response of the economy to the housing crisis, is that the presence of a robust middle class in fact strongly related to the health of the economy as a whole. Note, again, that the wealthy actually did better under Clinton than they did under Reagan/Bush, even though Reagan/Bush were trying to stack the deck in favor of the wealthy. The explanation I find intuitively appealing is that there is some sort of optimum supply:demand balance in the economy, and that when too large a fraction of income accrues to the wealthy, this balance becomes out of whack because their are too many suppliers (beyond a certain level of income, the wealthy start to invest/supply their excess income rather than consume it) and not enough consumers. Almost all of the countries that are comparably wealthy to the United States have flatter income distributions, the only exceptions being Hong Kong and Singapore (which are as much cities as countries).
It so happens that I agree completely with this analysis and have spouted it for more years than I can count. I wonder what happens to Silver now? He was a favorite blogger of the anti-Clintonites, who never seemed to grasp that Obama is in fact an extension of Clintonism on economic and trade policy.
Perhaps he will be ok with them. After all, the rehabilitation of Bill Clinton is even occurring at Daily Kos.
In any event, good for Nate Silver.
Speaking for me only
