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Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

Well, they didn't win, but the economy boomed under Clinton (from the Bush recession through the dotcom bubble) and violent crime plummeted in the same time frame as well.

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Violent crime plummeted throughout the 90s because abortions was legalized in 1973, 17-27 years before 1990 and 2000, respectively, roughly coinciding with the early adulthood period where a vast majority of criminal offenses are committed, the offender having the freedom of an adult without the fully formed prefrontal cortex of one yet.

The fetuses that were aborted were overwhelmingly from socioeconomic demographics (e.g. poverty, single mother households) where they would've been statistically far more likely to become criminals, so by allowing that generation to be aborted, we effectively aborted (for the first time) a large chunk of an entire generation of people that would've been statistically overrepresented among criminals, entering their peak criminal years right when Bill Clinton was president.

That's very bad for the Prison Economy. :-/

Don't worry, we tripled incarceration rates between 1980 and 2000, particularly of nonviolent drug offenders, to make up for the difference. This is America, after all, we can't just let the businesses fail!

Freakanomics made that argument, but there is very little statistical evidence abortions were the cause. For one thing, abortions were legal in states like California and New York, which also saw crime drops.

This is likely a myth; crime dropped all across the developed world in a similar timeframe, but dates of legalisation of abortion likely don't line up. One popular speculation is the phasing out of leaded petrol, but really this one seems to remain a case of "shrug, dunno".

The world is complex and most phenomenons are high dimensional.

It’s very likely: - criminal potential populations were reduced - economics lead to stable options for more individuals in the late 90s - lead was removed - a myriad of other improvements in society that generally led to Less crime

An assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994, the number of deaths from mass shootings fell, and the increase in the annual number of incidents slowed down. Any guesses as to what trends in firearm related deaths looked like when the ban was allowed to expire in 2004?

This broadly attributed to the infrastructure spend of the internet and greenspans new “unlimited productivity in the digital age” realization — which Clinton did agree to, but at the price of the promises he made

Beg pardon, but I can't quite make out what your point is. Dole/Kemp lost, but they get credit for the Clinton-era economic boom, which is well known to have been stronger and lasted longer than the more famous Reagan-era boom?

My point was, in response to the OP, to explain to the commenter what had subsequently happened in the context of that motto, pointing out that democrats deliver even what republican strategists think voters want.

I can't imagine a reading of my comment that suggests I am giving Dole/Kemp credit for any of this though.

I think the point was you can't evaluate their campaign promises because they never governed. Here's what happened instead....

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