http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f19813ac-1aae-11dc-8bf0-000b5df10621.htmlDemocrats look beyond Clintonomics
By Krishna Guha and Edward Luce in Washington
Published: June 14 2007 22:22 | Last updated: June 14 2007 22:22
Next week Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, will join a march in Washington DC to push for a bill that would make it easier for US workers to join a trade union.
After almost seven years of George W. Bush’s presidency, the Democrats have departed from many of the economic nostrums held during the great economic boom of the 1990s presided over by Bill Clinton.
Then, the Democratic party’s priority was to reduce America’s fiscal deficit to free up capital for higher investment by the private sector. Mr Clinton was also aggressive in shrinking the size of government, and opened up foreign markets through the North America Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay Round, which led to the creation of the World Trade Organisation. The role of unions barely featured.
Today, even the economic architects of the Clinton years, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, who were successive Treasury secretaries, question much of the 1990s agenda now that the traditional link between productivity growth and wage growth appears to have broken.
Their main priorities, reflected in the campaign stances of the leading presidential contenders, are to spread the benefits of growth more widely, restore progressivity to the US tax system and maintain America’s openness to trade through policies to address its negative impact on some US workers.
“The notion that the government is too large is absurd,” Mr Summers said this week. “We all talk of the central importance of education but if paint is chipping off classroom walls, how are people supposed to believe we mean it?”
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