The Bill Clinton Myth

Earlier this week, former U.S. president Bill Clinton gave the keynote address [24] to the Democractic National Convention in an effort to lend some of his popularity to Barack Obama. With the unemployment rate still stubbornly high at 8.1%, Obama has lost many of the enthused voters who put him into the Oval Office in 2008. Clinton was tapped to deliver the speech not only because of his image of a wonkish pragmatist but because of his presiding over the booming economy of the late 1990s. Like a prized mule, Clinton was dragged out to give Democrats someone to point to and say that his policies were the hallmark of smart governance.

What attracts the left, both politicians and media, to Slick Willy is the fact that he presided over a thriving economy even while raising taxes. This coincidence was championed as a justification for higher tax rates by Obama in his own speech [25] before the DNC.

I want to reform the tax code so that it’s simple, fair, and asks the wealthiest households to pay higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 – the same rate we had when Bill Clinton was president; the same rate we had when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest surplus in history, and a lot of millionaires to boot.

The Clinton-era tax hikes, it is alleged, provided the federal government the means to create a healthy middle class. Or at least that’s the only casual connection that can be gathered from such a philosophy. The left claims that economic growth is driven primarily by middle class spending. This spending needs to be subsidized in turn by government initiatives. As Nobel Prize winning economist and class warrior Joseph Stiglitz puts it:

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