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

[pampango]

38. I found some Krugman articles that dispel the "it was all the tech bubble" that caused the boom

in wages and employment during the Clinton years.

Clinton derangement syndrome

In my previous post I used the example of Clinton-era growth to argue that even growth in the mid-3s wouldn’t be enough to bring unemployment down anywhere near quickly enough. And sure enough, many of the comments are along the lines of “Clinton doesn’t deserve credit for the growth” or “It was all the tech bubble.”

Um, I never claimed that it was all Clinton’s achievement. Nor did what I said have anything to do with the sources of the growth (it wasn’t all a bubble, but that’s another issue). I used the Clinton year because they offer a useful example of what growth at the kind of rate we just saw in the 3rd quarter means for employment.

Yes, I had a parenthetical aside about Clinton-era growth being faster than most people realize. So?

But I guess I sort of expected this. Even now, any mention of anything good that happened between the end of 1992 and the beginning of 2001 is like waving a red flag. Amazing.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/clinton-derangement-syndrome/

Clinton presided over eight years of job growth, with job growth at roughly equal rates in the first and second halves of that eight-year period, and the internet bubble inflated only in the second half.

Yes, dotcoms went to ridiculous levels — but people weren’t borrowing vast amounts to buy them, so there wasn’t a deleveraging crisis when the bubble burst.

The point here is that while there was irrational exuberance in the 1990s, the Clinton-era expansion wasn’t fundamentally unsound the way the expansion of 2003-2007 — the “Bush boom” — was.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/a-tale-of-two-bubbles/

I’m old enough to remember the cries of doom when Clinton pushed through an increase in top tax rates. If you were reading the WSJ editorial page, or Forbes, or listening to Newt Gingrich, you knew that it was time to sell all your stocks and wait for the depression.

And Obama, of course, was bringing on hyperinflationary collapse with his health reform and tax hikes at the top.

Needless to say, none of it happened; what the Democratic booms show is that you can strengthen the safety net and raise taxes on the wealthy without causing economic disaster.

If politics made any sense, Democrats would be celebrating Clinton in the way Republicans celebrate the blessed Ronald, and they’d be hailing Obama as Saint Bill’s second coming.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/21/democratic-booms/?_r=0