"When in the mid-1970s, the United States suffered the twin problems of high inflation and high unemployment -- or stagflation -- these anti-New Dealers pounced. Blaming the problem on New Deal structure, they insisted that only deregulation, union-busting, and tight money would restore growth and stabilize prices." Aid to Families With dependent Children was changed from a "federal entitlement program to a state block grant, built in several new eligibility requirements, and capped spending." Michael Tomasky said that while benefits "were slashed dramatically in some states, in others, the results were tolerable and sometimes were good." "In reality, the overall result was an increase in extreme poverty of roughly 150 percent." [1]
"Today, the replacement welfare program helps few poor families." "Clinton was no exception -- in some cases, his policy amounted to top-down class war. In particular, he cemented the idea that antitrust law should mostly be abandoned as a bipartisan consensus." "He [Clinton] signed broad financial deregulation in 1994 and again in 1999, both times resulting in a wave of consolidation across the industry. Wall Street got huge -- and hugely profitable -- soaring to a peak of around 40 percent of corporate profits after the second round of deregulation." "But unlike the Clinton presidency, Obama's strain of New Democracy politics implemented in the wake of the 2008 crash, did not deliver the economic goods as advertised. Both output and job growth were pathetically weak after the immediate crisis and remained so throughout."
"The Justice Department leveled wrist-slap fines for things like market rigging and even money laundering for the drug cartels. Worst of all, it did almost nothing to halt the systematic mortgage fraud that swept the nation after the financial crisis, as banks foreclosed on millions of people with blatantly forged documents." "Obama's top priority was to protect the gigantic, top-heavy financial system at all costs. Banks weren't compelled to absorb the losses from the burst housing bubble, which was pushed onto homeowners instead."
"The president's [Obama's] signature health-care reforms shared a similar defect. In order to make it attractive to the economic elite, Obama negotiated by preemptively buying off well-heeled interest groups, from medical providers to insurance companies."
"Instead of being politically advantageous to triangulate between the interests of upper-class-friendly neoliberalism and the Democrats' traditional working-class base, it became a huge liability." "In similar circumstances, the Obama Democrats -- following the basic formula of Clintonism -- rescued the banks with gobs of public money. They did not return to vigorous antitrust enforcement. They largely stood outside while financial criminals plowed a ragged hole through the rule of law. The Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill, though it did very laudable things, did not meaningfully restrain Wall Street's power. (And many of its key regulations were effectively slow-walked by Obama's regulatory czar.)"
Growth "since the 1970s has largely been middling to poor, with the brief exception of the late '90s tech boom -- and even that didn't hold a candle to the explosive boom of the 1960s. Then too, regulation by state agencies was merely replaced by even worse and less accountable regulation by monopolist corporations."
Footnote:
[1] Ryan Cooper, "Somewhere in Between," The Nation, March 12, 2018.
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