Back to Work - Bill Clinton [55]
Cuban was wrong, but he wasn’t all wrong. I had the good fortune to become president at the moment when the information technology (IT) revolution broke out of its strongholds in Silicon Valley, Massachusetts, Texas, and northern Virginia into virtually all American businesses and homes. During my eight years, IT jobs represented only 8 percent of total employment but accounted for more than 20 percent of job growth and more than 25 percent of income growth. So the tech boom did lead to higher-than-estimated tax revenues, which enabled the United States to get its budget in balance earlier than either my administration or the Congressional Budget Office first predicted.
But our economic plan, especially the 1993 budget, also made a big difference, for two reasons. First, the budget reversed twelve years of trickle-down economics. The combination of serious spending reductions and revenue increases drove interest rates down and sent the bond market roaring. Business investment increased, and lower annual interest costs on all loans and credit purchases saved $2,200 a year for the average family, providing more money for Americans to spend on computers and other tech products. Second, because accelerating the spread of information technology was at the heart of our economic strategy, we took a number of other steps that helped produce more jobs and growth, including the E-Rate, which saved schools, hospitals, and libraries $2 billion in Internet access costs; the decision to oppose taxing Internet sales for a few years to get e-commerce up and going; and the new telecommunications law, which fostered competition and gave many entrepreneurs the chance to hold their own with large companies.
I left office just as the so-called tech bubble was deflating, bringing in its wake a short recession. IT stocks had gone through the roof in the late 1990s, as demand for telecommunications products and services increased an astonishing 500 percent a year between 1997 and 1999. The recession was short-lived, largely because the bursting bubble dropped the growth rate to “only” 50 percent a year. Soon the American economy was growing again, but without many new jobs, because we didn’t follow the 1990s IT boom with a new source of job growth for the first decade of the twenty-first century.
When he was governor of Texas, President George W. Bush signed legislation that helped make his state first in the nation in the production of electricity from wind. After he became president, his Energy Department released a study saying that with an adequate transmission system, 20 percent or more of our nation’s electricity could come from the wind that blows from North Dakota’s border with Canada to south Texas’s border with Mexico. If clean energy had been targeted as our source of new jobs in the last decade, a lot more of them would have been created.
Even if we can get more money flowing with steps like those I outlined above, we still have to have at least one big source of new, well-paying jobs. In his first two years, President Obama identified and pushed to implement four of them: building a twenty-first-century infrastructure, leading the world in the production of green energy and energy conservation technologies, restoring America’s manufacturing base, and doubling exports.
The Tea Party bloc in the House will almost certainly oppose any congressional action in these areas if it involves new spending. That’s an ideological nonstarter for them, whether it would work or not. And the Senate Republicans will try to filibuster any new spending because they’re afraid it will work. Nevertheless, I hope the president will propose what