Arthur Laffer on Bill Clinton
With government spending completely out of control, one likes to think of other presidencies to look for better management. Well, it wouldn’t be the prior president, George W. Bush, because he spent like a maniac. You would like to look back to Ronald Reagan and think he did the best job. But really, he was never able to slash government spending as he would have liked to have done. At best, he just for a time slowed the growth of government some.
But there was another president, uh-hum, a President Bill Clinton, that some say did the best job of all in recent years. Economist Arthur Laffer gave his view back in 2007:
“… he became more Reagan than Reagan the day afterwards. He lost the House, he lost the Senate, he lost the governorships, he lost the state legislatures. And then he became more Reagan than Reagan: He got Nafta through Congress, against the unions, against his own party. He reappointed Reagan’s Fed chairman twice. He signed welfare reform, that you actually have to look for a job to get welfare. He cut government spending as a share of GDP by 3.5 percentage points. No president ever has come anywhere near him on that. He had the biggest capital gains tax cut in our nation’s history in ‘97. He got rid of the retirement test on Social Security. This guy was a great president and I voted for him twice.”
