Back to Work - Bill Clinton [2]
Only a third of the stimulus money went into direct jobs projects, mostly roads, bridges, and other infrastructure construction; and into incentives, loans, and grants to increase the manufacturing of new clean-energy products and more energy-efficient technologies. For example, between January 2009, when President Obama was inaugurated, and Election Day 2010, the United States had gained thirty new battery plants, built or under construction, increasing America’s share of the world market for the batteries that power hybrid and all-electric vehicles from 2 percent to 20 percent in less than two years. We’ll have the capacity to fill 40 percent of the market by 2014, if the incentives are maintained.
In other words, the crash occurred because there was too little government oversight of and virtually no restraint on risky loans without sufficient capital to back them up; the recession was prevented from becoming a depression because of a government infusion of cash to shore up the banking system; and the downturn hurt fewer people because of the stimulus, which supplemented wages with a tax cut, saved public jobs, and created jobs through infrastructure projects and incentives to create private-sector jobs, especially in manufacturing.
The success of the Republicans’ antigovernment attack was doubly surprising to me, because of their own record over the previous eight years. They cut taxes and increased spending at roughly twice the rate it had increased during my eight years in office, creating few new jobs but ending four years of balanced budgets and surpluses and doubling the national debt even before the financial meltdown. And, of course, they also regularly voted to raise the debt limit so they could continue to borrow and spend, a practice I had worked hard to end.
When the Democrats regained a majority in Congress in 2007, they inherited an already severe mortgage crisis and very weak job growth. By the time President Obama was inaugurated, we had been in a recession for more than a year, and the financial crash in September 2008 had turned it into the worst downturn since the Depression, sending both the annual deficit and the total national debt even higher. Something had to be done to stop the decline. Immediately, the antigovernment movement reversed course. After eight years in which the Republicans had increased spending at a rapid rate, they opposed spending by the new president and Congress to put a floor under the recession, and they began blaming the Democrats for the explosion of debt caused by their own policies and the crash.
ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING THINGS to me is how easy it was to persuade so many Americans, even those who rely on government programs, to join in the government-bashing. One congressman was captured on camera looking dumbfounded at a town hall meeting on health-care reform when an angry constituent shouted that he didn’t want the government “messing with my Medicare”! In Arkansas, which has a large agricultural economy, farmers who had always lobbied hard for agricultural supports voted against the first Arkansan ever to chair the Senate Agriculture Committee, Senator Blanche Lincoln, because she was for “too much government.” As far as I could tell, her main contributions to “big government” were sponsoring a big increase in nutrition aid