Back to Work - Bill Clinton [46]
PART II
What We Can Do
CHAPTER 6
How Do We Get Back
in the Future Business?
FIRST, WE NEED TO GET OUR game face on. Critics have been betting on America’s demise for more than two hundred years now. They derided George Washington’s military acumen, describing him as little more than a mediocre land surveyor. As Lincoln was about to become president, an Illinois newspaper editorial called him a “baboon” who would destroy the country. Nikita Khrushchev said the Soviet Union would bury us. In the 1980s, the Japanese were going to out-produce and out-trade us into oblivion. I could go on and on. You get the picture. No one can take the future away from us. But we can take it away from ourselves.
Not long before the United States entered World War II, Winston Churchill famously said that America always does the right thing, “after exhausting all other alternatives.” We can’t afford to waste any more time exhausting dead-end alternatives. It’s time to do the right thing. The right thing is to put America back in the future business.
As you saw from the previous chapter comparing America’s current standing in many areas with those of our competitors, the most successful countries have both vigorous market economies and active, effective governments working together to achieve common goals.
There is simply no evidence that we can succeed in the twenty-first century with an antigovernment strategy. To get more economic growth that is more broadly shared, we’ll have to pursue the strategy that works.
It shouldn’t be all that hard. After all, America developed it in the first place. From Theodore Roosevelt through FDR, government helped us shave the rough edges off the Industrial Revolution, stabilize the financial system, sustain older Americans, build great infrastructure, bring electricity and telephone service to rural America, mobilize to defeat the Depression, and win World War II. And the economy kept growing. After World War II, until 1981, government policies helped us build the world’s greatest middle class; reduce discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation; lower poverty rates; open wide the doors of college; increase access to health care; and clean up our environment in a way that promoted, not undermined, economic growth. Through it all, the economy got stronger, and the competitive market created more wealth, more jobs, and rising incomes that lifted the middle class and reduced poverty.
Then we began to organize our politics around the idea that government is the problem, except for the eight years I served and President Obama’s first two years. In 1994 and 2010, the voters—including those who stayed home—gave Congress to a more radical, not conservative, brand of antigovernment activists. I was convinced then and remain convinced today that most Americans didn’t intend to take such a drastic turn in either election. They just thought they were getting too much government from the Democrats and wanted more balance. That became clear during my yearlong budget fight with Newt Gingrich and the Republicans throughout 1995. After the American people sided with my position, things settled down, and we began to work together.
How it develops this time remains to be seen. President Obama has a tough hand to play. Since the Democrats failed to raise the debt ceiling when they had the chance, in November and December 2010, his decision not to fight the Tea Party Congress and risk defeat in trying to get a bigger debt reduction deal with both spending cuts and tax hikes is understandable, though the agreement to raise the debt ceiling doesn’t create more jobs now or do much to solve the long-term debt problem. In early September 2011, the president outlined specific plans to create more jobs, including many ideas previously advocated by both Republicans and Democrats, and to reduce the debt by $3 trillion when the economy begins to grow again.