Back to Work - Bill Clinton [19]
In a positive political environment, liberals and conservatives could learn from each other and advance the public interest. Liberals want to use the government to solve problems and are usually eager to experiment, believing, like Robert Browning’s Andrea del Sarto, that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” True conservatives are more cautious, reminding us that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Liberals believe that government can solve social problems, or at least mitigate them. Conservatives believe culture, including a strong work ethic and stable families, matters more. Progressives believe they can advance liberal goals in a way that reinforces positive cultural norms and avoids “too good to be true” options. Libertarians caution against the potential of even well-conceived government initiatives to restrict individual liberty. In the end, we need to take into account all of these perspectives to reboot and rebalance our economy. Today, our process is too tilted in favor of powerful private interests over the public interest, in favor of short-term financial gains over long-term employment and income growth, in favor of consumption over investment, in favor of pushing more of our national income up to the top 1 percent over increasing the incomes of the middle class and giving poor people a chance to work their way into it.
The only people who have taken themselves out of this needed debate are the antigovernment ideologues. They already have the answers, and the fact that the evidence doesn’t support them is irrelevant. The inevitable consequence of their policies is to push the pedal to the metal of the most destructive trends of the last thirty years, to increase inequality and instability, and to forfeit the future.
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1 In the 2005 Energy Policy Act, Congress agreed in effect to insure the nuclear industry against losses in building new power plants, since no private insurance company will issue policies to do so.
2 The student loan reform law will actually cost $60 billion less over ten years than the current system. The bill allocated $40 billion to increasing Pell Grants and other student aid, with the remaining $20 billion applied against the debt. So repeal actually increases the debt!
3 The cuts apparently had no adverse impact on Medicare Advantage. In 2011, a record number of private companies applied to the Department of Health and Human Services to provide the program’s services to seniors.
4 Margot Roosevelt, “Critics’ Review Unexpectedly Supports Scientific Consensus on Global Warming,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2011.
5 Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 537.
6 I was one of two governors representing the states in working with the Reagan White House on welfare reform in 1987–88 and with the Bush White House on developing national education goals in 1990. Both efforts were serious, cooperative attempts to solve problems in a way that involved Congress and the states, without regard to party.
7 In the eight years of my administration, health costs increased at about the same rate as overall inflation, and we had an increase in the percentage of Americans with health insurance for the first time in twelve years.
8 The experience of other countries proves the point. Banks in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Iceland got in trouble without any subprime mortgage securities because they took on too much debt without adequate cash reserves. By contrast, Canada has a unified banking system that stayed strong because banks limited their risks in both commercial and investment operations.
9 See http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CDOC-107sdoc18/pdf/GPO-CDOC-107sdoc18-1-12-4.pdf.
CHAPTER 3
Why We Need Government
WHAT DO WE NEED A NATIONAL government for in the twenty-first century? According to the antigovernment activists, not much beyond