Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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I’m not kidding. They discuss the battle between the progressive and the Wall Street wings of the Democratic Party then tell readers;
“For Democrats who could lead the party in the future, the challenge will be to articulate a new populist direction without denigrating the Obama record or abandoning the contributions of Bill Clinton.”
Of course the most important contribution of Bill Clinton was an over-valued dollar that led to a huge trade deficit. The demand gap that was created by the trade deficit (this is income that creates demand overseas rather than the United States) was filled by the stock bubble in the 1990s and the housing bubble in the last decade. The fallout from the collapse of these bubbles has been disastrous. In the case of the housing bubble, the changes in Congressional Budget Office projections from before the collapse to the present imply a cost to the country of $24 trillion ($80,000 per person) in lost output through 2024.
One might think this would be grounds to abandon the Clinton legacy, but hey, Balz and Rucker say they better not.