A concern about something Hillary said in an interview

[passiveporcupine]

Asked about income inequality, an issue igniting the left, Clinton cited approvingly the president's record – that is, the record of her husband, Bill Clinton. "I don't think it is foreordained" that inequality will widen in the modern economy, she said in the interview. "I go back and look at what my husband achieved." She cited economic strength, job creation and the number of Americans lifted from poverty. "It's not an accident," she said.

If she really believes this, that the trend of inequality did not continue during Bill's presidency, and is blind to the fact that under Bill, more jobs shipped overseas and more wages declined for the middle class (adjusted for cost of living)...then how is she going to change anything? How is she going to stop the trends that are economically tanking so many people in the middle class now?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/07/07/hillary-clinton-barack-obama-different-campaigns-different-challenges/12267593/

She still repeats the questionable (disproved by Politifact) statistics that 100 times more people moved from poverty to middle class under Bill's term.

http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2014/nov/07/bill-clinton/did-100-times-more-people-ascend-middle-class-unde/

[DemocratSinceBirth]

1. Do you believe Ronald Reagan was a better economic steward than Bill Clinton?

thank you in advance.

[passiveporcupine]

4. No, but, this isn't about Reagan.

It's about Hillary's beliefs of what will help move the people in this country upward, not just increase GNP and reduce national debt.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. Bill Clinton raised taxes on the 1%, reduced unemployment to 3.9% and left Bush* with a surplus.

eom

[passiveporcupine]

12. He may have reduced unemployment, but

for lower wage service jobs. He let all the good manufacturing jobs go.

He did nothing to protect unions.

It's easy to reduce debt by cutting welfare and other social necessities, and end up with a surplus when GNP is a result of building the wealth of all the corporations that got rich using cheap offshore labor while incomes and quality jobs dropped at home. A lot of manufacturing jobs moved to southern states (some with right to work laws) where they could pay lower wages (that is still happening). Also a lot of growth was during the deregulation of the banks that caused our economy to crash. Do you think that was worth it?

[Scuba]

13. +1

[SoapBox]

19. +1

[99Forever]

21. +1000

[George II]

22. Most of the good manufacturing jobs had already gone or were in the process of leaving...

...under Reagan/Bush.

They kept touting that they created xxxx amount of jobs (forget the actual number, but it was huge), not mentioning that, for example, 100,000 $20 an hour jobs were lost and replaced with 160,000 $10.00 and hour jobs. That was a net loss of income. In fact over the 12 years they were in office overall net income dropped overall.

That's the employment climate Clinton inherited in 1993, along with the first coordinated obstruction of a President that I can remember. Yet Clinton still was able to counter that by working to create good jobs, reducing unemployment.

That stuff about good jobs moving south at lower wages is an exaggeration - more jobs moved overseas in the previous 12 years.

[passiveporcupine]

24. Again, I agree with you on the egress of jobs to other countries

But Bill Clinton signed off on Nafta which just helped to escalate the problem.

[LeftOfWest]

29. right wing BS.

"good manufacturing jobs had gone or were in the process of leaving..." right wing LIES.

Post links to that.

Or..

Get some sleep now. You need it.

Or Post Links Now...

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

6. Hillary lives in a dream world - she thinks if she says something, that makes it true.

[LiberalAndProud]

2. Yeah, the Welfare Reform Act was awesome.

And we got the added bonus that it introduced abstinence only education to the classroom. Win/Win.

[guillaumeb]

3. A very good observation.

When she said:"I go back and look at what my husband achieved", I wonder exactly what she means.

He did destroy public assistance under the guise of reform.

He did allow the outsourcing of countless jobs because of NAFTA.

He did sign the Gramm Leach Blily Act that eliminated the Glass-Steagall Act and enabled the financial meltdown.

He rebranded Reagan's economic supply-side idiocy and made it a policy position for the Democratic party.

Are those the achievements to which HRC refers?

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

9. Hillary makes it sound as if those are the policies she wants to take us back to. Not buying what she's selling.

[tularetom]

7. She might want to read this before she goes around bragging on him so much

BILL CLINTON IS SORRY FOR A LOT OF THINGS, Huffington Post, July 17, 2015



http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026984984

Apparently he's trying to help her out by admitting his entire term was a giant fuckup, but has failed to communicate that to her.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

10. No way Bill could get elected in this day n age running on his policies in the 90's. Why would Hillary want to tout her husband's record, as if that were something to be emulated?

[truedelphi]

27. I totally agree with you.

Bill was lucky because the internet was not really up and running in terms of informing the public. It was still taking baby steps, and did not and could not get the word out on anything back then. For the most part, the internet was dial up BBS's, rather than interactive forums.

[passiveporcupine]

14. To sum it up from the Huffpo link in your link above

WASHINGTON -- As president, Bill Clinton was wrong about Wall Street deregulation and various elements of his foreign policy, pushed trade policies that painfully drove up drug prices around the world, sowed chaos in Mexico through his prosecution of the drug war and exacerbated the problem of mass incarceration through an overly punitive approach to sentencing.

There is a lot more at the link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-clinton-is-sorry_55a83397e4b0896514d0e220

[TheNutcracker]

8. Bill handled an ecomomy of the Internet birth and computers in every home.Entire decade of new money

[guillaumeb]

11. But so much of the money, and economic activity,

is devoted to money chasing money in search of fractionally higher returns.

When Henry Ford and the other people who perfected the automobile started their companies, millions of people directly or indirectly employed by the car companies moved into the lower middle class. Their earnings stimulated the economy and this stimulus lead to the creation of more good paying jobs.

This is, of course, a very simplistic account. leaving out the role of unions and assorted labor reformers, but the current Internet economy has not so far led to any measurable amount of secure, full time positions. And the financial sector, which is where the majority of the economic activity takes place, creates a tiny handful of highly paid hedge fund managers and does no benefit to the larger economy.

Wal-Mart specifically and the service sector generally has replaced the unionized manufacturing sector as the largest employer, with terrible results. Except for the top 1/10th of a percent.

[truedelphi]

28. I suspect that anything that came about, tech wise, would have come about

regardless of who was President.

Microsoft came about in the late Seventies; so did Apple. I don't remember anyone handing Jimmy Carter any credit for that. Personal computers expanded greatly under Reagan - while the dot com bubble came about under Bill Clinton. Technological gains come about regardless, it seems.

I do give Bill credit for refusing to go to war against Iraq. That refusal allowed the economy to be stable. But once he did so, there was an immediate repercussion of the media seizing on the Monica Lewinsky story sot hat the RW could get their impeachment hearings.

[BrotherIvan]

15. Of course

She is trying to have it both ways.

[dsc]

16. median incomes went up

even adjusted for inflation under Clinton. They didn't go up as fast as they should have but they did go up.

[passiveporcupine]

17. You are correct, but you need to look at the whole picture

Though the Clinton years featured higher taxes on the rich, they also featured a more balanced tax code with higher taxes on middle and lower income taxpayers, and fewer nonpayers of the federal income tax. Those advocating a painless return to Clinton era tax policy should note the full implications of such a tax policy shift.

http://taxfoundation.org/blog/federal-tax-burden-under-clinton-higher-all-not-just-rich

extreme poverty was rising by the end of Clinton's term, and to some extent the rise during the Bush years can be attributed to Clinton's welfare policy

The Clinton years saw the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent pull away from the rest of the country more aggressively than they had before.

The top income groups fared very well under Clinton but the median household also saw wages increase, from $661 a week to $700 a week, in inflation adjusted terms. But that number varies quite a bit by education level, as high school dropouts saw wages fall from $424 to $407 a week, according to Census data:

The financial industry exploded
The trend of finance taking up a greater and greater share of the economy continued apace during the Clinton years, as Bureau of Economic Analysis data shows:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/05/the-clinton-economy-in-charts/

charts at link

[Doctor_J]

18. She's pretty loose with "facts", and much of her campaign is platitudes and generalities

She should just stick to comparing WJC's economy to those of Bush I and Bush II. You can't really go wrong there. But these declarations like, "I believe women should get paid the same as men", while meaning absolutely nothing, bring tears to the eyes of her fan club and get dozens of rec's.

[cantbeserious]

20. Selective Memory Of The 1%

eom

[whereisjustice]

23. Then how is she going to change anything? I know!

She isn't. She doesn't even acknowledge the problem. She thinks everyone can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and get a gig for $600K a year like her daughter at MSNBC. With no experience.

She also believes that if you give Wall Street enough money and influence, and send enough jobs to Asia, benefits will trickle-down to lower classes. Eventually. With no particular time frame in mind.

No matter how she tries to deny it, the truth is known. With her involvement as a Walmart director and her corporate/Wall Street backed DLC and 3rd way, she helped architect the destruction of the US middle class and put millions into poverty.

Clinton is counting on an electorate who isn't smart enough to realize her role in these events.

If she wins the nomination, her policies will continue to crush opportunity for average Americans to get an education, develop a career and have a good, stable quality of life. Meanwhile, her rich benefactors will get no end of legislative support.

Eventually we'll all be giving Uber rides and cooking dinner for H1B visa workers who are here to take our jobs, and on our day-off we can listen to her champion Wall Street deregulation, TPP and NAFTA on NPR from the apt. we share with 6 other strangers working to make ends meet in the gig economy.

[passiveporcupine]

25. Don't dismiss Hillary supporters as being unintelligent

They are intelligent. They just see things differently than progressives do.

[whereisjustice]

26. I'm trying to understand beyond abortion where Clinton supporters differ from trickle-down

conservatives. Hillary was too late to the gay marriage event to have that as her tag line.

So what is it? If we wanted tax credits, environmental rollbacks, bank deregulation, unchanged minimum wage and TPP we'd vote Republican.

Beyond the entitlement of office that conservatives in the Democratic party attribute to her, what distinguishes her ideas and makes them worthy of Presidency during the most difficult and polarizing time the US has faced since the civil war?

Intelligence is a tricky subject. Students in India and China do well on standardized tests. But still they struggle to get electricity to half their country, something the US figured out how to do long ago - with public schools and fair wages and lesser test scores.

That vision you speak of in terms of seeing things differently is destroying the middle class and driving a wedge between rich and non-rich. It is the "moderate" approach that is stuffing our prisons with the poor and disadvantaged. That "centrist" vision has cause economic chaos, lost jobs and devastated communities across America.

We are becoming more and more like Asia - authoritarian, corrupt, self-centered, and incapable of making the simple personal sacrifices and commitments necessary to maintain a high quality of life for the majority of Americans.

Instead we get Clinton assuring the rich that they'll never be inconvenienced by her Presidency. No, that inconvenience will be pushed on to the backs of working families. Again.

The conservatives in both parties have created a generation without opportunity or the means for advancement - one that only survives within a subsistence economy and black market.

Time is up. Clinton and the 3rd way had their chance. They only made things worse. Having her as nominee is a horrible choice for America. The more people who understand her role in the mess, the better.

[passiveporcupine]

30. Intelligence is not the most important factor

You can be brilliant and still be a sociopath. I think emotional maturity is far more important, as it includes wisdom and compassion. That doesn't mean intelligence always goes without wisdom and compassion. I wish I understood how to reach people who seem to "not understand" what seems obvious to me.

Hillary supporters really think she is progressive. And for them, maybe she is, because maybe that is as "progressive" as they can be.