Back to Work - Bill Clinton [6]
That’s what America has to do. We have to get back in the future business. And that’s why politics, with all its frustrations and distractions, is still important. Over the last three decades, whenever we’ve given in to the temptation to blame the government for all our problems, we’ve lost our commitment to shared prosperity, balanced growth, financial responsibility, and investment in the future. That’s really what got us into trouble.
Even before the financial crash, the economy had produced only 2.5 million jobs in the previous seven years and eight months; median family income after inflation was $2,000 lower than it was the day I left office; income in-equality and poverty had increased; and home mortgage foreclosures were exploding. Almost all our economic growth was fueled by home building, consumer spending, and finance, all based on easy credit and heavy leverage. We lost manufacturing jobs every year. Ordinary citizens maxed out their credit cards to keep consumption up as they struggled with flat incomes and rising costs, especially for health care, which increased at three times the rate of inflation.
As the government abandoned balanced budgets in 2001 for big tax cuts and large spending increases, the national debt, which had decreased from 49 percent to 33 percent of national income in the 1990s, soared back to 62 percent in 2010. Consumer debt went from 84 percent of average income in the 1990s to a high of 127 percent in 2007. Since the crash, savings have increased a bit, and some debts have been written off, but our citizens’ debt is still at 112 percent of average income.
This is not the way I wanted the United States to start the twenty-first century. I did my best as president to prepare America for it—to create jobs, raise incomes, and reduce poverty; to improve the quality of our air, food, and water and preserve irreplaceable natural treasures; to increase our competitiveness in the global economy by maintaining our leadership in science, technology, innovation, and access to higher education; to alert the nation to the dangers of climate change and the economic benefits of avoiding them; and to increase our security by promoting peace and prosperity around the world while increasing our ability to deter and prevent security threats, especially from terrorists and the proliferation of and trafficking in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
We pursued that agenda while keeping taxes under 20 percent of GDP and spending under 19 percent. When I left office, the United States was in position to become debt-free within twelve to fifteen years, handle the retirement of the baby boomers, and make the investments required to keep the American Dream alive in the twenty-first century.
I didn’t succeed in every endeavor, and I made some mistakes in trying. But overall, the United States was better off at the dawn of the twenty-first century than we had been eight years earlier. I think one reason is that we began by asking the right questions: How can we build a nation and a world of shared benefits and shared responsibilities? How can we accelerate the spread of the positive and reduce the reach of the negative forces that affect us all? What is the proper role of government? What should America expect from and promote in the private sector? What about civil society, the nongovernmental organizations that have been important to us since our founding? How can we appreciate, cultivate, and profit from our diversity while reaffirming that our common humanity and shared values matter more?
During the campaign of 2010 and for most of the last thirty years,