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The vendetta continues
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Why Lott and Barr hate Clinton
(12/22/98)

Strong-arm and hammer
(12/08/98)

The GOP goes "liberal"
(11/17/98)

Head of Newt
(11/03/98)

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Home Movies
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J O E+C O N A S O N + ++ L E F T + H O O K | PAGE 2 OF 2

Facing his senatorial jury as he spoke, Clinton wisely refrained from gloating over past struggles with the Republicans about economic policy. Yet he could have done so with considerable justification. Having survived into his second term, he is now enjoying the fruits of the 1993 tax increase, which cost him dearly when it passed and probably lost Congress for the Democrats in 1994. Anticipating the reaction to his new programs, Clinton might have pointed out (but didn't) that the frightening forecasts of his opponents back then were not exactly prescient.

They fought fiercely against Clinton's first budget, which only got through the Senate when Vice President Al Gore cast a tie-breaking yes vote. That budget's tax hike, falling mainly on the rich, was seen by Republicans as a repudiation of Reaganomics and the enormous deficits that bogus doctrine had created.

In those early days of the Clinton administration, the leading conservative spokesman on Capitol Hill was a loud Georgian named Newt Gingrich. Remember him? Maybe -- but you probably don't remember what he said about the president's economic plan in August 1993: "The tax increase will kill jobs and lead to a recession, and the recession will force people off of work and onto unemployment and will actually increase the deficit."

How soon would these awful consequences arrive? "I believe this will lead to a recession next year," Gingrich said, but abandoned caution a few weeks later. "Stay tuned for the next 60 days," he opined. "I think we're frankly now living on borrowed time." Now the former speaker has plenty of time on his own to rethink these views.

Gingrich was hardly alone in his angry orations about what he and other Republicans incorrectly called "the largest tax increase in American history." Practically every conservative in Congress popped up to echo their great leader's warning. "A recipe for economic disaster," squawked Phil Crane of Illinois. "It is going to lead to a Clintastrophy, an economic Clintastrophy," quipped Indiana's Dan Burton.

It's no surprise when flaky reactionaries like Burton and Crane parrot stupid prophecies, but after five or six years of strong expansion and deficit reduction, the deep-thinking savants who now head the relevant House and Senate committees sound just as dumb.

Back on April 1, 1993, Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, distinguished chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, displayed little wit and less wisdom when he said, "April Fool, America. This Clinton budget plan will not create jobs, will not grow the economy, and will not reduce the deficit."

His Texas colleague Gramm, moving up this year to chair the Senate Banking Committee, was even more voluble and equally mistaken. "We are buying a one-way ticket to a recession," he claimed in August 1993. More than five years later, we still haven't gotten there. "I want to predict here tonight," Gramm said then, "that if we adopt this bill the American economy is going to get weaker and not stronger, the deficit four years from today will be higher than it is today and not lower ... When all is said and done, people will pay more taxes, the economy will create fewer jobs, the government will spend more money, and the American people will be worse off."

Another outspoken opponent was Kasich, the youthful Ohioan now preparing to run for president. But if he still recalls what he said in '93, he may have to switch parties first. "This plan will not work," he proclaimed in a CNN interview. "If it was to work, then I'd have to become a Democrat and believe that more taxes and bigger government is the answer."

Well, that depends on the question, congressman. But when we consider Social Security, income inequality and other pressing problems of the new economy, it will pay to remember how consistently wrong the right has been for the last decade or so.

The era of Reaganomics is dead, and President Clinton killed it.
SALON | Jan. 26, 1999

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Clinton in Crisis
Salon's complete coverage of the investigation, impeachment and trial of the president.

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