Back to Work - Bill Clinton [17]
Whatever our shortcomings, because Democrats, whether conservative, liberal, or moderate, basically believe government has an important role to play in our lives, they want it to work well. That makes most of them less ideological and more open to policies that have both progressive and conservative elements than their antigovernment adversaries.
For example, under President Reagan, the Democratic Congress actually approved slightly less spending than he asked for, by increasing domestic spending a little less than they reduced his requests for defense spending increases.9 Under the first president Bush, they passed the PAYGO rule. When I was president, we passed the 1993 budget to reduce the deficit by $500 billion, roughly half from spending cuts, half from tax increases, with only Democratic votes. The bill produced a much greater reduction in the annual deficit than experts predicted, eliminating roughly 90 percent of it even before the Balanced Budget bill was enacted, because it led to lower interest rates, more investment, and higher growth, which brought in more revenues and reduced costs as more people got jobs and left government supports behind. Many Democrats voted for the welfare-reform bill after we persuaded the Republicans to restore the federal eligibility for food stamps and medical care for welfare recipients and their children. Most Democrats voted for the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 and the subsequent ones that allowed us to pay down $452 billion on the national debt.
The debt would have been reduced by even more, had it not been for the big tax cuts, spending initiatives, and brief recession in President Bush’s first year in office, which included the final eight months of my last budget. If the tax rates and spending restraints of the 1990s had been kept in place, and the economic crisis had not occurred, the United States would have paid off its entire public debt by 2013 for the first time since 1832, perhaps a couple of years later because of the cost of going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Even if the financial crash had happened, it would have been much easier to handle and would not have cast such a shadow over our future. And we could have financed a larger stimulus with less controversy and a smaller burden on our future.
In 1993, Democrats did raise taxes on upper-income Americans and large corporations but also cut them on lower-income working families and later, in legislation with bipartisan support, voted to cut them on middle-class parents with children, parents who adopted children, and families paying for higher education, on income from capital gains, and on investments in areas of high unemployment. We strengthened regulations to clean the air and water and ensure the safety of our food. And Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative not only eliminated sixteen thousand pages of regulations, it also ended unnecessary programs, improved others, and changed government procurement and other practices to improve performance and save money.
Once the antigovernment bloc in Congress realized, in early 1996, that it would take another election victory to repeal the tax increases in the 1993 budget or to eliminate or severely reduce the government’s role in education, economic development, health care, environmental protection, and several other areas, we worked together to reform the government’s role so that it could serve the American people in the new reality of the twenty-first century.
If you look at what has actually happened in America over the last thirty years, it’s clear that the idea that government