Paul Krugman and the wonderful, Everything Has Changed economic miracle.

From The Sideshow:

...not so long ago that Krugman was among the many who refused to credit the Clinton administration with having anything to do with the improved economic picture of the time. (Mind you, I'm not saying what Clinton did was all good by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I think a lot of it ranged from short-sighted to deplorable, and quite a bit of it set us up to be vulnerable under Bush's far more extreme push into oligarchy. For that matter, Bill Clinton is not the member of his administration who I think can really take credit for the good parts of the economy in the '90s - that honor goes to the guy who made the Internet into such a vast and important industry: Al Gore. But Clinton's willingness to rein in costs and earn us more money certainly helped a lot.)

However, as Krugman notes, there weren't any real gains for working people in general under Clinton, who was working against an increasingly conservative Congress during a period when anti-worker propaganda had been gaining ground. It's unclear what Al Gore, as he was then, would have done to prevent things from getting worse, but Gore's openness to technological problem-solving and his interest in alternative energy programs might have generated new industry that would have helped us rebuild our economic base.

But we never got to see that future, because Bush-Cheney took control instead, and consolidated the oligarchy's gains against ordinary people. Putting their ideology into practice, they have devastated our economy. It does matter who is in power.

The take away message here - Don't eat the seed corn. You're going to need it.

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