United States (USA) – Clinton Term

By: Paul Young, CPA, CGAJuly 22, 2016

Disclaimer• This presentation is on view of the Bill Clinton Government

Paul Young - Presenter

Bio• CPA/CGA• 25 years of experience in Academia, Industry and Financial solutions• Youtube Channel -

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAArky1bAXPSuV2NLtUnyLg

Agenda• Introduction• Government role on taxation/spending• Who was Bill Clinton?• Bill Clinton Presidency• Budget Deficits• US Economy/Clinton• Banking/Financial Services / Clinton• Income inequality• Job Creation/Clinton• PMI Index• Corporate Tax• Medium Income• Housing Starts• Interest Rates• Trade Deficits

Introduction• People get caught up with the hype when it comes to politicians

which is fine. However, people need to look at each era of government to understand the conditions faced by government like currency valuation, inflation, economic growth, cost of social programs, interest and commodity prices• This presentation will discuss Bill Clinton’s Policies as well as what has

happen with the United Stats over the years.• It should also be noted that it is not one policy that impacts either

social spending or economic growth, but multiple policies.

Government – Key Video• Margaret Thatcher on Taxation -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAGqKhSw5Lg

Bill Clinton – Early Years• In 1970, Clinton entered Yale Law School, earning his degree in 1973 and meeting his future wife, Hillary Rodham, whom he married in 1975. During

this period he also worked on the 1970 U.S. Senate campaign of Joe Duffy in Connecticut, and toward the end of his studies he managed the Texas campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern (who lost Texas in the Nixon landslide). After graduation, Clinton moved back to Arkansas with a job teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Almost as soon as he arrived home, Clinton threw himself into politics, running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives against incumbent Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt. Although Clinton lost this 1974 race, it was the closest election for Hammerschmidt in his twenty-six years in Congress, marking Clinton as a rising political star.

• Two years later, Arkansas voters elected Clinton state attorney general. Then in 1978, at age thirty-two, Clinton ran for governor, winning an easy victory and becoming one of the nation's youngest governors ever. However, his youth and inexperience quickly left Arkansans unimpressed. Governor Clinton had several missteps, including difficulties in handling rioting among Cuban refugees temporarily interned by the federal government at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. He also raised auto license fees to pay for road construction and alienated the state's powerful timber interests by an unsuccessful intervention in the controversy over the practice of clear-cutting. Consequently, the voters turned him out in favor of Frank White, a little known, freshly minted Republican savings and loan executive. Clinton became the youngest former governor in American history.

• Shocked by his defeat, Clinton went to work for a Little Rock law firm but spent most of his time campaigning for reelection. In the 1982 race, Clinton admitted his mistakes and used his incredible charm and well-honed TV ads to convince the voters to give him another chance. He won in 1982 and again in 1984. Voters then supported him for two, four-year terms in 1986 and 1990.

• As governor, Clinton championed centrist issues. He strongly advocated educational reform, appointing Hillary Clinton to lead a committee to draft higher standards for Arkansas schools. One of the administration's proposals called for competence tests for all teachers, a policy development that stirred up a national debate. Governor Clinton's sweeping education reforms positively impacted Arkansas schools, which experienced a decrease in dropout rates and an increase in college-entrance exam test scores under his watch, although the state's overall rankings moved very little. During Clinton's tenure as governor of Arkansas, he favored capital punishment. He promoted welfare reforms aimed at pushing welfare recipients into the workforce and moved decisively to promote affirmative action—appointing more African Americans to state boards, commissions, and agency posts than all of his predecessors combined. Additionally, he initiated a style of government that resembled a permanent election campaign. Using the talents of the political consultant Dick Morris, Clinton pushed legislative agendas based upon public opinion polls. The governor and his strategist then built support for their policies through well-orchestrated sales campaigns that used television, leaflets, and telephone banks to pressure state lawmakers.

Bill Clinton Presidency• In January 1993, the U.S. economy was reeling from a second wave of recession following an

unprecedented stock collapse in the late 1980s, a savings-and-loan crisis that saw several bank failures, and an oil-price spike resulting from Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. U.S. poverty and crime rates were climbing. Clinton promised both job growth and a reduction in the national debt: "We must do what America does best --" he declared in his inaugural address"-- offer more opportunity to all and demand more responsibility from all.

• Clinton's economic strategy focused on fiscal discipline; investment in education, healthcare, and technology; and opening foreign markets. Over strong Republican opposition, the Clinton administration passed budgets that combined tax increases on the wealthy with government spending cuts, achieving the largest budget surpluses and debt reduction in U.S. history by 2000. Poverty levels fell, more than 20 million jobs were created, and unemployment rates consistently decreased over his two terms in office, reaching their lowest levels since the 1960s. With Republican support, he passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, removing trade barriers in North America, and a sweeping welfare-reform bill in 1996 that required recipients to work and placed lifetime limits on benefits, fulfilling his campaign promise to "end welfare as we have come to know it."

USA/Economy - Clinton• The Clinton-era boom was in no small part a continuation of the Reagan-era boom, which was, like the performance of the economy under previous and subsequent presidents,

only partly a product of the president’s economic philosophy and policies. Two of the great economic-policy successes of the Reagan era — the taming of inflation and the bundle of reforms generally described as “deregulation” — were rooted in Carter-era policies. Ronald Reagan knew enough to understand that enduring the recession engineered by Paul Volcker and the Fed was necessary to wring inflation out of the economy, but he wasn’t terribly happy about it, and neither were voters: Reagan’s approval ratings were at 41 percent at the end of 1982, and his unpopularity cost Republicans a couple seats in the House. At the beginning of 1983, Reagan’s job-approval number was down to 35 percent. But in May of 1980, inflation had been 14.4 percent; in May of 1986, it was 1.5 percent, and Reagan’s approval number roughly doubled.

• Inconclusive” is the conclusion more often than not in these kinds of debates. The federal budget was in surplus (“primary surplus”) toward the end of the Clinton administration, as Mrs. Clinton points out. Why? Partly because of tax increases that Republicans fought vigorously against; partly because of spending controls that Democrats fought vigorously against; partly because of a stock-market bubble that liberated both the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans from making some really tough decisions. Mere coincidence doesn’t actually tell a very good story for the Clinton administration: During the last quarter of his predecessor’s presidency, real GDP growth was 4.33 percent; during the last quarter of Clinton’s presidency, it was down to 2.89 percent and plunging. By September 2001, U.S. GDP growth was down to less than one-half of one percent and by the end of the year growth was only 0.21 percent. Maybe you think that was the lingering effect of Clinton policies; maybe you think Bush policies took an immediate effect; maybe you think it was other events (there was some economic disruption in September of 2001). In general, the people who know the most about these issues have the least certain opinions on that

• There were two big economic events during the Clinton administration that had profound effects on the world economy. One was the emergence of the web as an important cultural and economic phenomenon, a blessing for which we may thank, among others, Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen (and a whole lot of taxpayers from around the world) and which the Clinton administration had effectively nothing to do with. The other, which seems to be largely forgotten in the English-speaking world, was the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which was a catastrophe but one that spurred important corporate and banking reforms (especially in the Republic of Korea) that helped lay the foundations for much of the prosperity of developed Asia today. That has profound effects on the U.S. economy, too, which are not mainly the result of policies pursued by the Clinton administration or any other administration.

Banking/Financial Services• President Clinton's tenure was characterized by economic prosperity and

financial deregulation, which in many ways set the stage for the excesses of recent years. Among his biggest strokes of free-wheeling capitalism was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. It is the subject of heated political and scholarly debate whether any of these moves are to blame for our troubles, but they certainly played a role in creating a permissive lending environment.

Income Growth

Income Growth• Clinton’s record was quite different, at least in part because there were no recessions during his two terms – but also because he pursued very

different policies, including a tax cut that was better targeted to middle incomes than Reagan’s, and a large increase in funding for both K-12 and higher education. This time, the prosperity was widely shared. “You can have all the economic growth in the world, “ Clinton said at Georgetown, “and if only ten people have it, you don’t get very much.”

• Under Clinton, job growth was about 30 million – the most since the 1970s. The poorest quintile gained 24%, which was slightly more than the richest quintile gained under Reagan. And under Clinton the richest quintile gained 20% – slightly less than what the bottom quintile gained. Meanwhile, median income increased 17% – the most rapid increase since the 1960s. Under George W. Bush, median income would fall again – substantially more for the bottom quintile than the top quintile.

• Weirdly, Clinton didn’t mention in his Georgetown speech his single greatest accomplishment in fighting inequality – quadrupling the size of the Earned Income Tax Credit. (In discussing poverty, he was more interested in defending his 1996 welfare reform.) Even though top income tax rates are much lower today than they were when Ronald Reagan entered office, the federal income tax is, remarkably, slightly more progressive today than it was then – thanks to tax relief and refundable tax credits provided to low-income people through the EITC. In his Georgetown speech, Clinton pointed out that 7.7 million people moved out of poverty during his eight years in office, compared to only 77,000 under Reagan.

• Clinton didn’t say so, but his record in providing shared prosperity, in addition to being much better than Reagan’s or Bush’s, was also considerably better than President Obama’s. Median income today is4% lower than it was when the recession ended six months into Obama’s first term. Job growth under Obama has been sluggish, as it was under George W. Bush. There was a large increase in the number of Americans living in poverty during the recession, and the poverty rate today stands at about 15% – the highest it’s been since 2000.

• It is this “upper-tail” inequality that has grown fastest during the past two decades. And while income share for the 1% started growing in the late 1970s, it grew almost as fast under Clinton as it did under Reagan. During Reagan’s two terms, the 1%’s share of the nation’s income grew by half, from 10% to 15%. Under George H.W. Bush, the 1%’s income share stayed about the same. Under Clinton’s two terms, it grew by about one-third, to 21%.

Job Creation / President

PMI Index

Corporate TaxThe top income tax rate in the United States is 39.6 percent. That ranked 33rd highest on a list of the top rates in 116 nations compiled this year by KPMG, an international tax advisory corporation. Another survey - by tradingeconomics.com, a website that compiles economic data - ranks the U.S. top rate 38th highest among 155 nations and territories.

Source: http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2015/oct/20/donald-trump/trump-says-us-has-highest-tax-rate-anywhere-world/

Median Income -

USA median Income

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqLDHQ-iJU8

Housing Starts The meltdown was the consequence of a combination of the easy money and low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve and the easy housing engineered by a variety of government agencies and policies. Those agencies include the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and two nominally private “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The agencies — along with laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act (passed in the 1970s, then fortified in the Clinton years), which required banks to make loans to people with poor and nonexistent credit histories — made widespread homeownership a national goal. This all led to a home-buying frenzy and an explosion of subprime and other non-prime mortgages, which banks and GSEs bundled into dubious securities and peddled to investors worldwide. Hovering in the background was the knowledge that the federal government would bail out troubled “too-big-to-fail” financial corporations, including Fannie and Freddie.

Source: http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/14/clintons-legacy-the-financial-and-housin

Interest Rates

USA Trade deficit by year• Hillary and Democrats like to talk a lot about the jobs created in Bill’s second term.

Admittedly, jobs were created, but they were mostly in low pay service occupations. Meanwhile, higher paid manufacturing jobs were being lost in the millions as a result of Bill Clinton free trade policies alone. Clinton proved an even fiercer “free trader” than Reagan. In 1993, he rammed through Congress legislation to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to include Mexico. One million, higher paid U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost due to NAFTA on Clinton’s watch, another 880,000 lost to China due to Clinton giving that country what is called “preferred nation trading rights” (PNTR), and another 1.2 million due to the U.S.’s exploding trade deficit in general — according to research by the Economic Policy Institute in the U.S. Corroborating the Institute, the U.S. Commerce Dept. in the 1990s estimated that 13,000 jobs are lost for every US$1 billion trade deficit — and that trade deficit rose from US$118 billion in 1993 to US$436 billion by 2000 under Bill Clinton

Trade deficit• The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis,

through the Department of Commerce, announced today that the goods and services deficit was $41.1 billion in May, up $3.8 billion from $37.4 billion in April, revised. May exports were $182.4 billion, $0.3 billion less than April exports. May imports were $223.5 billion, $3.4 billion more than April imports. The May increase in the goods and services deficit reflected an increase in the goods deficit of $3.7 billion to $62.2 billion and a decrease in the services surplus of $0.1 billion to $21.1 billion. Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit decreased $7.2 billion, or 3.5 percent, from the same period in 2015. Exports decreased $47.2 billion or 4.9 percent. Imports decreased $54.3 billion or 4.7 percent.

Other Links:• http://www.breitbart.com/economics/2016/06/03/health-care-displa

ces-manufacturing-tops-jobs-obama/