The Clinton Legacy: Domestic Policy

Bill Clinton's supporters prefer to identify him with the cleanup of the fiscal mess left by his Republican predecessors; the strongest burst of economic growth in the half century since the end of the post-war boom in which, for once, gains extended beyond the most affluent; and a long list of positive acts in the areas of worker, consumer and environmental protection after Reaganite misrule.

Alas, in dealing with the deficit Clinton merely extended the work of George W. Bush, and in respects even the profligate Reagan, in his fixation on cutting government and spending, in substantially the same ways, with Reinventing Government, with Medicare cuts. At the same time, for all the talk of making the rich pay their "fair share" of taxes, he was very restrained in regard to their incomes--even as he raised taxes on Social Security benefits and fuel--such that relative to their wealth they paid less at the end of his administration than at its beginning.

Indeed, Clinton pursued the Reaganite project more generally of cutting government even where it didn't save money, or even cost additional money, with his welfare "reform" that ended its status as an entitlement; with enthusiastic privatization and deregulation of the economy, as it transferred major utilities to the private sector and released such restraints as remained on a Wall Street chomping at the bit to go back to the "Roaring Twenties"; with outright corporate welfare, most notoriously giving away $70 billion worth of broadcasting licenses in the course of the 1996 telecommunications reform, which not incidentally fed into the sector's rapid monopolization.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the latter, the measure of success he achieved as a deficit-citter and macroeconomic manager was substantially due to a technology boom--a technology bubble--that had little to do with his personal action, his reappointment of Ayn Rand fanboy Alan "easy money" Greenspan to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, while bursting on his watch (a problem Greenspan met by inflating another bubble).

At the same time the list of actions that might be regarded as positive from a progressive's perspective is comparatively meager on examination, certainly next to what he promised--whether the ambitious Goals 2000 education standards, the rebuilding of the national infrastructure, or the health care reforms that would "cover everyone" with the help of a "public option." After adjustment for inflation the Department of Education's budget remained flat, while Clinton pushed hard for school privatization, and the country never got anywhere near the Goal 2000 objectives. The infrastructure program was dropped, with job creation instead left to neoliberal enterprise zones (while the infrastructure continued its decay). And there were almost as many uninsured at the end of his administration as at the start, while health care costs ran the same big slice of the GDP, in spite of the comparatively good times (this job, too, left undone).

In the end the problems Clinton was supposed to resolve were left to fester, while he conserved his energies for policies that, ultimately, furthered the very neoliberal project he was elected to halt and reverse--and in ways that proved costly for the American public. Along with the promises unkept, the crippling of the government's capacity to protect workers, consumers, the environment, even to the extent of enforcing regulation on the books; the destruction of the social safety net; the deregulation and easy money policies that permitted the monopolization of the media, the malfeasance of Enron and ultimately the crash of 2008; are all undeniably as much a part of the Clinton legacy as any achievements that administration can claim.*

* Those interested in the details, and sources for all this, are directed toward the author's SSRN-published paper, "Was the Clinton Administration Neoliberal?"