The economic growth in the 90s was largely fiction. I recall BJ invited the CEOs of the top 100 to lunch for his first 100 days. “to reassure them”.
I don’t know what he told them but I suspect that it went something like, “This ‘new math’ thing is something we are all struggling with so it may be a while before we can really sort things out.”. They figured it out. Cook the books. Well, they figured the “new math” out real good right at the end. Can anyone besides me remember “Enron”?
Suicides and shame devastated corporate board rooms. THAT was the famous “dot com bust”. Meanwhile the Community Re investment Act was chugging through the banks setting up tranches of AAA junk in US Real Estate. So they not only engineered the “good years” but built the bomb that blew up in 2007 really, the shock wave didn’t destroy things until 2008.
So when I see folks talk about the Clinton Economy in 1990s I realize they had at least a couple of hemings of the Kool Aid.
And in the debate, Trump warned us about a “big fat ugly bubble” in relation to the stock market.
You are absolutely correct in your post #14!
I also remember the boasting about all the new jobs created back then. They were service industry minimum wage jobs! In other words, they were slave wages which couldn’t even pay the rent and buy the groceries, much less keep the big box stores in business. They led to an increase in personal bankruptcies which eventually forced Obama care on us...which is a disaster...because the slaves couldn’t afford medical care either.
I remember the ‘’house of cards’’ and the impact it had on the financial lives of those around me in my community.
The idea of NAFTA was to bring up the standard of living in the poorest nations and even if ours declined a little bit, things would eventually level off so that poverty would be reduced world wide, and then we could all benefit financially.
It hasn’t worked that way as history proves. As Trump has pointed out several times, our standards are now third world nation status compared to the rest of the world. The first impact is always noticed in the inner cities first. But NOW it’s seen in middle America as those beautiful homes people bought during the house of cards years...crumble, slowly due to abandoned mortgages, lack of paint, rickety fences and fewer flowers and bushes.
Inner cities have traditionally been the poorer part of town, but now they’re a war zone.
Thank-you Mrs. Clinton. We ain’t seen nuttin’ yet, have we?