I.O.U.S.A - Addison Wiggin [61]
And as soon as he got there, of course, all the Europeans, who were as cynical as hell, stabbed him in the back. The poor man had a stroke and never actually recovered. But he set the stage for this next phase of American military and political development.
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stage, because America at that stage was the world ’ s number one military and economic power. It also set the stage for the fi nancial development of America, because by setting up the Federal Reserve, by setting up the institutions which allowed America to go to war, it allowed America to begin social programs. These programs were not invented by America. They were invented by Germany, by Bismarck. But these things created the foundation of the next stage of American growth, which was going from the simple republic of the Founding Fathers to the megalomaniacal kind of empire that we have today.
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Robert Rubin
Robert Rubin, the 70th secretary of the U.S. Treasury (1995 – 1999), was one of the key players in the Clinton administration ’ s balanced budget. In 1999, he, along with Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers, was dubbed by Time magazine as “ The Committee to Save the World ”
after their work with the IMF and others to combat the fi nancial crises in Russia, Asia, and Latin America. He is currently a director and chairman of the Executive Committee at Citigroup.
Q: Can you tell me about Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 1993?
Robert Rubin : What happened is that the president - elect got us all
[everyone involved in economic policy] together in the Governor ’ s Mansion and we had prepared a presentation with respect to what we at least thought an economic policy ought to look like going forward. And we started that discussion with President - elect Clinton, and very shortly into the discussion, President Clinton said, “ Look, I understand. Our threshold issue has to be to restore physical discipline if we ’ re going to have sustained recovery. And then on top of that, we can build everything else that we want to do. ” And that really was the beginning of the formulation of his economic policy, and all that we did for the next eight years.
Q: Was there a sense at that time that a recovery for the United States was necessary?
Robert Rubin : Well, the country, as you may remember, in the very end of 1989, started to have a decline in economic conditions, in what ’ s called gross domestic product. And by the time you got into 1990, unemployment was increasing, and at some point we had a recession. The presidential campaign of 1992 was run in fair measure on economic issues because the country had had by that time, roughly speaking, three years 127
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of relatively diffi cult economic conditions with relatively high levels of unemployment. By the time you got to the end of 1992, unemployment was over 7 percent, and President Clinton had been elected on a platform of putting in place economic policy to create sustained recovery, increase jobs, and increase standards of living. And that was a very important part of what he focused on in the early part of his administration.
Q: Were some other people arguing for a middle - class tax cut?
Robert Rubin : Well, President Clinton never wanted to have a middle - class tax cut, and I think he was right in many ways. But the problem was that by the time you got to the point where we were actually formulating a policy for the new administration, the defi cit projections that had come out of the prior administration were so substantial