Blog Post

AEIdeas

In my new The Week column, I take a look at Hillary Clinton’s idea that she’ll put hubby Bill in charge of “revitalizing” the US economy. Of course that idea assumes a) the US president — or delegated “economy czar” — can deeply and quickly influence the economy, and b) the ex-president would do a good job in exerting whatever influence he might wield.

As I wrote, “Even though presidents get credit for the good and blame for the bad that happens on their watch, it’s never straightforward to figure out how much they deserve, if any.” The 1990s economy was a very good one, its success helped along but a number of factors other than Bill Clintonomics (whatever that was year to year).

In a similar analysis, FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman concludes, “Bill Clinton deserves, at most, a small sliver of the blame for the financial crisis. But he probably doesn’t deserve much credit for the late-’90s boom, either.

That the 1990s boom ended in a tech-stock meltdown and then a housing bubble and bust does remove some shine from Bill Clinton’s economic record and legacy. And for some on the left, so does the big jump in income inequality:

Of course, there were no Occupy Anywhere protests back then. Nor did Clinton get a primary challenge from a democratic socialist complaining about the vast wealth of America’s “millionaires and billionaires.” We had fast growth, spiking inequality, and this (again from my The Week column): “A recent Brookings analysis looked at how the middle class has fared during the past five presidencies and found the largest average annual gains in median household income occurred during the Clinton and Reagan administrations, with a clear edge to Clinton.”

Some on the left think inequality of outcome or an expanding income gap is an intrinsic bad. Yet when all boats are rising, as they pretty much were doing that go-go decade, that seems to be a minority opinion. So perhaps policymakers should focus on policies that help lift all boats in a rising tide of broadly shared prosperity — even if some boats rise faster than others.