Must-Read: Michael J. Boskin: Can Trump Turn His Presidency Around?

Must-Read: Naughty, naughty, Mike Boskin!

Bill Clinton’s presidency began not with “lack of discipline and a failed health care reform effort”. Bill Clinton’s presidency with a major tax increase and spending growth=reduction Reconciliation Bill plus NAFTA. The Clinton Reconciliation Bill—that not a single Republican did not vote against—was what moved us from the unsustainable and imprudent fiscal policies of those Mike Boskin worked for to a trajectory that—with the good luck of catching the wave of the dot-com boom—brought the large budget surpluses of the late 1990s.

Mike Boskin’s faction then threw those budget surpluses away on tax cuts for the rich.

And the Republican Congressional caucuses of the 1990s had very, very little to do with it—except to try as hard as they could to block it.

It’s just arithmetic, after all. It’s easy to check.

Let me recommend you take Dan Davies’s One-Minute MBA http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/daniel-daviess-one-minute-mba.html, with particular attention to Lesson (1)(d).

Also, take a look at Young Juicebox Matt’s piece http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/weekend-reading-matthew-yglesias-trumps-big-mistake-on-health-care-was-not-realizing-republicans-were-lying.html, particularly paragraph 7: remember, the Project Syndicate audience is not as gullible as the Fox News audience.

Michael J. Boskin: Can Trump Turn His Presidency Around?: “Bill Clinton’s administration began with a lack of discipline… https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/can-trump-turn-his-presidency-around-by-michael-boskin-2017-08

…a failed attempt at health-care reform, and a loss for the Democrats in the 1994 midterm elections. But Clinton turned things around, appointing new aides, moving toward the political center, winning reelection in 1996, and working with a Republican-controlled Congress to balance the budget and reform welfare…