Legal Commentary

A Return To The 1990s

By Big Tent Democrat

By Big Tent Democrat

Matt Yglesias writes:

McCain[']s [priorities] are reducing the level of government services in order to pay for an indefinite prolongation of the war in Iraq, the extension of Bush's tax cuts for the highest-income Americans, a large hike in non-war defense spending, and a series of new tax breaks. Clinton and Obama are both, in somewhat different ways, offering more services paid for by returning to something more like the levels of taxation that so devastated the national economy in the 1990s.

(Emphasis supplied.) I think that is right and it is what made Obama's comment on the Clinton economic policies of the 1990s so perplexing:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration . . .

As Yglesias rightly points out, both Hillary Clinton and Obama are promising a return to the fiscal policies of Bill Clinton. It makes no sense for Obama to lump the Clinton era with the disastrous Bush Presidency.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 20, 2008 (boomark / email).