Obama's Clinton Problem: Deregulation made the prosperity of the 1990s possible.
reason.com
reason.com
I think an honest appraisal would say that Clinton-GOP governance gave us both the prosperity of the 90s and today's crisis. Or that Clinton-GOP governance was largely irrelevant to both.
I honestly don't know enough to demonstrate this empirically, but am suspicious of attempts to assign all credit for good things to policies you like but none of the blame for bad things. As the article says, the Clinton-GOP 90s policies are pretty much still the same policies we have in place to day. (An exception is Sarbanes-Oxley, which has been much criticized, but I have not heard anyone blame it for the current financial crisis.)
As for our President Elect, I think his relationship with the Clintons is a very complex one. At times he was hyperbolic in his praise. But earlier he more or less got Bill to throw a temper tantrum by suggesting that Reagan was a more transformational President than he had been. At other times he made the implication that alternating Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would leave us pretty much in the same place we have been. After Obama secured the nomination and all the Democrats closed ranks is when Obama got all gushy about the Clintons and hyperbolic in his praise.
So I would not put too much stock in remarks about the Clintons to determine Obama's true leanings on specific policy issues.
My thoughts exactly. It's not easy to look at prosperity, before a storm, and identify it's contribution to the storm. But the correlation is interesting enough to make blanket statements regarding prosperity and deregulation subject to no conclusion.
You've never heard anyone point out that Sarbox raised the cost of being a public company, which increased the number of LBOs, which leveraged the economy and fed the CDO market, which led to the collapse?
I think Sarbanes-Oxley was over regulation, but letting a 50+ billion$ company get leveraged 30x is stupid.
I would never ever take one of my companies public (if we're lucky enough to get that far :-D).
It's interesting that SarBox has so many advocates. After all, it sounds good on paper -- kind of like killing flies with nuclear radiation. Definitely shows that the government means business.
In my opinion, it seems that when a crisis occurs, we have a tendency to over-react (SarBox, TSA, etc) Politicians would rather be remembered for "doing something" even if later on it turns out to be a huge CF.
Really? Where's your evidence? I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's a pretty big leap.
PS: For a slightly different take: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/would-glass-steagall-s...{3AA33D85-AD38-41B4-B300-033235B5734A}
Edit: that link is not working goto http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/would-glass-ste... then click on Go to Article from MarketWatch » at the bottom.
The lesson here is how important it is that politicians ignore their campaign promises. In Alan Greenspan's book "The Age of Turbulence", Greenspan expresses surprise that the Bush administration wanted to follow through on the tax cuts and rebates they promised when the government was running a surplus even after that surplus was projected to vanish. Other presidents, he recalled, were always willing to throw out campaign promises that no longer suited the circumstances.
This is where Obama's vagueness, stern rhetoric, and large margin of victory are reassuring. We probably won't give him too hard a time if he doesn't add a bunch of regulations, or if he decides to change his tax plan a bit. Hopefully this will help the experts do their job.
I just want to make sure that you are simply making an observation, and not trying to impeach the article by casting aspersions on the source.
In a similar fashion, if I tell you that an article recounts the same old many-worlds hypothesis, and you are acquainted with the many-worlds hypothesis, you may skip the article.
How about the case in which I am mistaken, and have never been exposed to a many-worlds argument that was well reasoned and persuasive?
I don't know if I would want to listen to an argument that claimed, for instance, that spirits lived in rocks. But if I were part of a community which found such an article interesting, I would find it more useful in terms of understanding both the posters and the cultural nature of the submission to take the argument on face value and submit a few kindly-worded criticisms. After all, maybe the other guy has never heard a clear, reasoned, and persuasive argument either, right?
Suppose I tell you instead at the top of my article that the following starts from the premise that rocks are alive. Then I proceed to argue that you should destroy your computer and throw it into the ocean to preserve the rights of the minerals therein. The logic is sound and it's written in a witty, convincing style.
Sure, that's only one article, and it sounds pretty novel. Now imagine there is a Rocks First! organization that puts out pamphlets, magazines, books, and press releases on rock rights and the mineral personhood amendment, and reinterprets recent history in terms of the silent rock genocides that humans have perpetrated against their inert brethren. You can be pretty sure of the position before you read the material; it is derived from their fundamental beliefs.
In such a case, an argument at the core of the fundamental beliefs might sway an organi-centrist to become rock-conscious, but not peripheral stuff about a recent amendment defining marriage as between a human and a human.
The Reason article, I think, is just what you would expect someone to say who believed dogmatically in the power of the free market. It doesn't take opposing viewpoints into account on market deregulation, nor does it attempt to address the core issues that convince them this is the proper interpretation of the Clinton years. It leaves a lot of important questions unmentioned and unanswered.
Which was not the claim that was made, right?