When Politics Get Weird
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Gary [email protected]
President Obama likes to say that we can’t return to the “top down” policies and deregulation that got us into this economic mess in the first place.
He likes to harken back to the Bill Clinton years, when things in the U.S. were pretty darn prosperous. He says what he wants to do is get us back to those prosperous days of Clinton.
The president simultaneously derides the George W. Bush administration as pushing us to the brink of economic disaster and says we have to avoid policies like his.
Fair enough.
The president says he “is fighting to grow the economy from the middle class out, not the top down. This election presents a choice between two fundamentally different visions of how to grow our economy and create good middle-class jobs.”
His website notes that he passed Wall Street reform to make sure that Americans would never again have to pay to bail out big banks.
The president also has a plan to bring jobs back to the U.S. by eliminating tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, and creating incentives for businesses to bring jobs back to America.
He has lots of other plans too, things like expanding renewable and green energy in the U.S. by using government subsidies.
And, of course, he already passed the signature legislation of his administration, the health care law known as Obamacare.
So here’s where it gets weird for me.
If you think about it, President Obama’s plans look a lot more like George W. Bush’s than they do Bill Clinton’s.
George W. Bush was the guy who enacted giant new government programs.
Remember the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit for seniors? How about that No Child Left Behind? There were the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. The USA PATRIOT Act. He gave us TSA screeners and airport security. A giant new farm bill. The Bush stimulus bill. (Remember when we all got a government check?) And then there was TARP – the Troubled Asset Relief Plan.
Most people think TARP was a President Obama program, but no, it passed under Bush. In it, the Treasury Department ponied up $500 billion to about 800 firms to shore up the financial sector.
Of course, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to boot.
The thing is, then-Senator Obama voted aye on some of that stuff during the last two years of the Bush administration – the Bush stimulus, for example.
And after becoming president, Obama was far from shying away from those policies.
He re-enacted the tax cuts, re-upped the PATRIOT Act, fired up his own stimulus plan, followed up the bailout of the financial institutions with a bailout of his own – the auto industry.
And Obama pretty much followed the timetable for the wars set up during the Bush administration.
See, from where I sit, Bush spent way too much money and expanded government to unprecedented levels.
And if the spending wasn’t bad enough, the regulation was worse.
The number of pages added to the Federal Register is a gauge of the swelling cadre of government forays into the private sector. in private affairs.
According to Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, Bush was second to none in enacting “economically significant regulations.” Those are regulations defined as costing the economy more than $100 million a year. Since 2001, Bush boosted that number by more than 70 percent. Since June 2008 alone to the end of his term, his adminstration introduced more than 100 economically significant regulations.
The only real deregulation under Bush was Sarbanes-Oxley, which was more like regulation than deregulation.
It set new standards for all U.S. public company boards, management and public accounting firms. It was in response to a number of big corporate scandals like Enron and Tyco.
So lets compare and contrast that record to that of President Clinton.
Clinton was frugal. He brought us to a balanced budget. He reformed welfare. (Welfare to work ring a bell, the very program that Obama just reigned in a bit?) He signed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” He signed NAFTA, the trade agreement people like to blame for outsourcing. He signed the Defense of Marriage Act.
But one of the most significant areas of Clinton’s policy performance was when it came to regulation. He was a big-time deregulator.
Under Clinton, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, was signed into law. Glass-Steagall had been around since the depression. It strictly separated traditional commercial banking from investment banking.
Clinton, and many others, said GLR benefitted banks of all sizes by allowing them to offer their customers insurance and brokerage services under one financial services roof.
Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted things like credit-default swaps from regulation.
Clinton also championed the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, which passed in 1994, before Republicans even took over Congress. It allowed banks to expand across state lines.
John Berlau, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, sums it up like this:
“Clinton-GOP governance, despite the constant bickering and backbiting, ironically left a shining legacy of prosperity, which bipartisan deregulation was so much a part of. In terms of economic growth, there are few better examples of bipartisan success than this tenure.”
See, Bill Clinton was a far more prolific deregulator than George Bush. And George Bush was a far more profligate spender that Bill Clinton.
Comes now President Obama, who has doubled down on the spending and regulating of the Bush years, creating huge debt and massive new bureaucracies.
Obama derides President Bush and embraces Bush’s policies.
And he embraces President Clinton and derides Clinton’s policies.
It’s a veritable political bizarro world.
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President Obama likes to say that we can’t return to the “top down” policies and deregulation that got us into this economic mess in the first place.
He likes to harken back to the Bill Clinton years, when things in the U.S. were pretty darn prosperous. He says what he wants to do is get us back to those prosperous days of Clinton.
The president simultaneously derides the George W. Bush administration as pushing us to the brink of economic disaster and says we have to avoid policies like his.
Fair enough.
The president says he “is fighting to grow the economy from the middle class out, not the top down. This election presents a choice between two fundamentally different visions of how to grow our economy and create good middle-class jobs.”
His website notes that he passed Wall Street reform to make sure that Americans would never again have to pay to bail out big banks.
The president also has a plan to bring jobs back to the U.S. by eliminating tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, and creating incentives for businesses to bring jobs back to America.
He has lots of other plans too, things like expanding renewable and green energy in the U.S. by using government subsidies.
And, of course, he already passed the signature legislation of his administration, the health care law known as Obamacare.
So here’s where it gets weird for me.
If you think about it, President Obama’s plans look a lot more like George W. Bush’s than they do Bill Clinton’s.
George W. Bush was the guy who enacted giant new government programs.
Remember the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit for seniors? How about that No Child Left Behind? There were the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. The USA PATRIOT Act. He gave us TSA screeners and airport security. A giant new farm bill. The Bush stimulus bill. (Remember when we all got a government check?) And then there was TARP – the Troubled Asset Relief Plan.
Most people think TARP was a President Obama program, but no, it passed under Bush. In it, the Treasury Department ponied up $500 billion to about 800 firms to shore up the financial sector.
Of course, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to boot.
The thing is, then-Senator Obama voted aye on some of that stuff during the last two years of the Bush administration – the Bush stimulus, for example.
And after becoming president, Obama was far from shying away from those policies.
He re-enacted the tax cuts, re-upped the PATRIOT Act, fired up his own stimulus plan, followed up the bailout of the financial institutions with a bailout of his own – the auto industry.
And Obama pretty much followed the timetable for the wars set up during the Bush administration.
See, from where I sit, Bush spent way too much money and expanded government to unprecedented levels.
And if the spending wasn’t bad enough, the regulation was worse.
The number of pages added to the Federal Register is a gauge of the swelling cadre of government forays into the private sector. in private affairs.
According to Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, Bush was second to none in enacting “economically significant regulations.” Those are regulations defined as costing the economy more than $100 million a year. Since 2001, Bush boosted that number by more than 70 percent. Since June 2008 alone to the end of his term, his adminstration introduced more than 100 economically significant regulations.
The only real deregulation under Bush was Sarbanes-Oxley, which was more like regulation than deregulation.
It set new standards for all U.S. public company boards, management and public accounting firms. It was in response to a number of big corporate scandals like Enron and Tyco.
So lets compare and contrast that record to that of President Clinton.
Clinton was frugal. He brought us to a balanced budget. He reformed welfare. (Welfare to work ring a bell, the very program that Obama just reigned in a bit?) He signed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” He signed NAFTA, the trade agreement people like to blame for outsourcing. He signed the Defense of Marriage Act.
But one of the most significant areas of Clinton’s policy performance was when it came to regulation. He was a big-time deregulator.
Under Clinton, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, was signed into law. Glass-Steagall had been around since the depression. It strictly separated traditional commercial banking from investment banking.
Clinton, and many others, said GLR benefitted banks of all sizes by allowing them to offer their customers insurance and brokerage services under one financial services roof.
Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted things like credit-default swaps from regulation.
Clinton also championed the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, which passed in 1994, before Republicans even took over Congress. It allowed banks to expand across state lines.
John Berlau, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, sums it up like this:
“Clinton-GOP governance, despite the constant bickering and backbiting, ironically left a shining legacy of prosperity, which bipartisan deregulation was so much a part of. In terms of economic growth, there are few better examples of bipartisan success than this tenure.”
See, Bill Clinton was a far more prolific deregulator than George Bush. And George Bush was a far more profligate spender that Bill Clinton.
Comes now President Obama, who has doubled down on the spending and regulating of the Bush years, creating huge debt and massive new bureaucracies.
Obama derides President Bush and embraces Bush’s policies.
And he embraces President Clinton and derides Clinton’s policies.
It’s a veritable political bizarro world.
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