With the 2012 election a year away, Democrats can latch onto an articulate, reality-based strategy for economic renewal that threads the needle between extremes. But this engaging, center-left manifesto wasn’t written by the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Rather, it was penned by someone who is constitutionally barred from seeking the highest office: former president Bill Clinton.
Clinton burst onto the national scene 20 years ago at a time of national economic self-doubt spurred by high unemployment and fears over a rising power in Asia. Sound familiar? In “Back to Work,” a slim volume packed with ideas on how to fix America’s broken job machine, the Man from Hope offers some well-timed optimism in the face of depressing statistics, such as the fact that the United States ranks 18th in high school graduation rates and 24th in infrastructure quality.
(Knopf) - ‘Back to Work’ by Bill Clinton
Clintonian to the core, “Back to Work” cribs proposals and anecdotes from all over — from Democrats and Republicans, from the public and private sectors — and includes a lengthy, somewhat windy list of 46 prescriptions. They consist of two parts wonkery and one part down-home common sense. While professors would call the functional difference between a tax credit and a spending increase, as Clinton writes, “a distinction without a difference,” he adds that “when I was growing up in Arkansas, we called it straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.”
The United States doesn’t have to swallow too many camels to get back on a path of growth, the former president argues. Rather, we just have to embrace our inner technocrats and abandon our foolish ways. Collecting one-quarter of the $345 billion in “taxes that are owed but unpaid every year” and putting just one-third of today’s no-bid contracts out to competition “could reduce the annual deficit by more than $100 billion a year,” Clinton writes. He also embraces controversial big ideas, such as the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s plan to raise the maximum taxable limit on Social Security earnings.
As the book moves on, the ideas come faster, more furious and in shorter form. The United States should set up an infrastructure bank. A small area, say an island such as Puerto Rico, should become a showcase for energy independence. Farmers should ink long-range food-supply contracts with China. And how about a property-tax holiday for investments that create a certain number of jobs? He notes, “This is an idea I first heard suggested by Newt Gingrich.” That’s a classic Clinton trope: He’s secure enough to love-bomb the guy who shut down the government and tried to impeach him.
And yet Clinton the effective partisan is also on full display. “Back to Work” does not cast poxes equally on both sides. As a group, he claims, Republicans have acted in bad faith and messed up his legacy. “From 1981 to 2009, the greatest accomplishment of the anti-government Republicans was not to reduce the size of the federal government but to stop paying for it,” he writes. And he includes a set of charts on job creation and economic growth by presidents that places him near the top and Republicans near the bottom.
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