Today’s Republicans Echo Their 1993 Objections to Clinton’s Budget
Over the past several days, I thought heard something extremely familiar. It seemed to me that the Republicans are making the same doom and gloom predictions that they used back in 1993 when discussing President Bill Clinton‘s budget. Remember how President Clinton was an “fiscal conservative”? He wanted to pay down the debt. He raised taxes on the middle and upper classes, the thought being that lowering the national deficit would keep interest rates low and help business expand. This, then, would create more jobs. Republicans argued, “that higher taxes would increase unemployment.” Nancy Johnson, Republican from Connecticut stated, “this bill takes more money than has ever been taken at one time from the sector that creates jobs.” Robert Michel, Republican from Illinois, may have said it best. “Let’s face it. The Clinton White House is out of touch. It’s absent. It’s out of ideas. It’s out of excuses. And it’s out of control.”
President Clinton balanced the budget. He created budget surpluses. He created 26 million new jobs. Median income rose under President Clinton. So I’m pretty convinced that Republicans do not have the right economic ideas for our economy. They didn’t back in 1993 and they don’t now.
From TP:
On Sunday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that President Obama is off to a bad start in part because Obama didn’t “sit down together” with Republicans (even though he did). Today, CNN asked President Clinton to respond to McCain, and Clinton ripped the GOP as being simply “automatic” in its opposition to Obama’s agenda:
CLINTON: [T]here’s 100 economic studies which show that you get a better return in terms of economic growth on extending unemployment benefits or investing money in energy conservation jobs to improve buildings than you do giving people in my income group a tax cut. But it doesn’t stop them. Those guys are on automatic. You punch a button and they give the answer they give you.
Watch video:
