Back to Work

by Bill Clinton

  I believe the challenges we face, which are tough enough on their own, are made even more difficult by the highly polarized, deeply ideological political climate in Washington. It is an almost alien environment to me now, because what I do today—in my foundation, in the Clinton Global Initiative, and in Haiti—is a world away from Washington’s political wars. We receive support from Democrats, Republicans, independents, and concerned citizens the world over. Instead of focusing on our differences, we come together to build a world of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities. Instead of making speeches, we focus on taking action on our common challenges, and on keeping score, so that we learn what works and what doesn’t. Whenever possible, we collaborate with both government and the private sector to do things better, faster, and at lower costs.

  It seems to be working: helping more than four million people with AIDS in developing countries get lifesaving medicine; increasing farmers’ incomes in Latin America and Africa; developing pro-growth approaches to fighting climate change around the world; fighting childhood obesity in the United States by reducing calories in drinks consumed by kids in schools by 88 percent; offering America’s first master’s degree in public service, as opposed to public policy, at the University of Arkansas’s Clinton School of Public Service; and building global networks of givers whose commitments at the Clinton Global Initiative have already helped more than 300 million people in 170 countries.

  I’ve been honored to work with both President George H. W. Bush on rebuilding efforts after the tsunami in south Asia and Hurricane Katrina and with President George W. Bush in Haiti to rebuild and diversify the economy there in the aftermath of the earthquake. After the tsunami I worked for two years as the UN secretary-general’s representative to the affected countries, as I have done in Haiti since 2008. Now I also work with the prime minister of Haiti, and with representatives of Haitian society and donor nations, to approve major projects and to assure their transparency and accountability.

  Doing this work in America and around the world, after eight years as president and twelve years as governor of Arkansas, has given me a lot of exposure to how the twenty-first-century world functions, the challenges America faces in making the most of it, and the barriers to meeting these challenges that the current debate in Washington has created.

  We live in the most interdependent age in history. People are increasingly likely to be affected by actions beyond their borders, and their borders are increasingly open to both positive and negative crossings: travelers, immigrants, money, goods, services, information, communication, and culture; disease, trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people, and acts of terrorism and violent crime.

  The modern world has many attractions—scientific advances, technological breakthroughs, instant information-sharing, greater social diversity, and the empowerment of people everywhere through cell phones and the Internet. But as we all know, people everywhere also face severe challenges, most of which can be grouped into three categories. The modern world is too unequal in incomes and in access to jobs, health, and education. It is too unstable, as evidenced by the rapid spreading of the financial crisis, economic insecurity, political upheavals, and our shared vulnerability to terrorism. And the world’s growth pattern is unsustainable, because the way we produce and use energy and deplete natural resources is causing climate change and other environmental problems.

  No matter what the naysayers claim, the evidence is overwhelming that the climate is changing because of human activity, and if we don’t change course quickly and sharply, the consequences are going to be terrible. The signs are all around us, in rising temperatures (nine of the hottest ten years on record occurred in the last thirteen years), melting ice caps, rising sea levels, more droughts, fires, floods, and severe storms. My native state of Arkansas is in America’s tornado alley just south of Joplin, Missouri, which was recently devastated by an especially powerful tornado. But in 2010 and 2011, tornadoes also hit in Queens in New York City and in Massachusetts, areas in the Northeast where they’re all but unheard of.

  Though these problems are affecting the lives of people in every nation, responding to them effectively presents very different challenges to poor and rich nations. Poor nations have to build systems that those of us in wealthy nations take for granted—economic, financial, education, health-care, energy, environmental, government service, and other systems that make prosperity and security possible and provide predictable rewards to citizens for hard work and honest dealing. Haiti is now trying to build such systems. When poor countries succeed in doing that, their citizens are able to rapidly increase their incomes, as Vietnam, Rwanda, and other developing nations have proven over the last fifteen years.

  Wealthy countries have such systems; they were built on the road to prosperity. The challenge is to keep them working, and improving, as times and conditions change, because at some point the people who run them and those who benefit from them inevitably become resistant to change: more committed to holding on to their positions than to advancing the purposes for which they were established in the first place; more interested in holding on to or increasing present advantages than in creating greater opportunities for others and a brighter future for our children. You can see these forces at work in the politics of Washington: The status quo is represented by much more powerful lobbying groups than the future is.

  Because the world is still organized around nations, the decisions national leaders make and citizens support today determine tomorrow’s possibilities. For poor countries, that means building systems that give more and more people a chance to have decent jobs and send their kids to school. For rich countries, it means reforming systems that once worked well but no longer do, so people can keep moving forward in an increasingly complex and competitive environment.

  That’s what America has to do. We have to get back in the future business. And that’s why politics, with all its frustrations and distractions, is still important. Over the last three decades, whenever we’ve given in to the temptation to blame the government for all our problems, we’ve lost our commitment to shared prosperity, balanced growth, financial responsibility, and investment in the future. That’s really what got us into trouble.

  Even before the financial crash, the economy had produced only 2.5 million jobs in the previous seven years and eight months; median family income after inflation was $2,000 lower than it was the day I left office; income in-equality and poverty had increased; and home mortgage foreclosures were exploding. Almost all our economic growth was fueled by home building, consumer spending, and finance, all based on easy credit and heavy leverage. We lost manufacturing jobs every year. Ordinary citizens maxed out their credit cards to keep consumption up as they struggled with flat incomes and rising costs, especially for health care, which increased at three times the rate of inflation.

  As the government abandoned balanced budgets in 2001 for big tax cuts and large spending increases, the national debt, which had decreased from 49 percent to 33 percent of national income in the 1990s, soared back to 62 percent in 2010. Consumer debt went from 84 percent of average income in the 1990s to a high of 127 percent in 2007. Since the crash, savings have increased a bit, and some debts have been written off, but our citizens’ debt is still at 112 percent of average income.

  This is not the way I wanted the United States to start the twenty-first century. I did my best as president to prepare America for it—to create jobs, raise incomes, and reduce poverty; to improve the quality of our air, food, and water and preserve irreplaceable natural treasures; to increase our competitiveness in the global economy by maintaining our leadership in science, technology, innovation, and access to higher education; to alert the nation to the dangers of climate change and the economic benefits of avoiding them; and to increase our security by promoting peace and prosperity around the world while increasing our ability to deter and prevent security threats, especially from terrorists and the proliferation of and trafficking
in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

  We pursued that agenda while keeping taxes under 20 percent of GDP and spending under 19 percent. When I left office, the United States was in position to become debt-free within twelve to fifteen years, handle the retirement of the baby boomers, and make the investments required to keep the American Dream alive in the twenty-first century.

  I didn’t succeed in every endeavor, and I made some mistakes in trying. But overall, the United States was better off at the dawn of the twenty-first century than we had been eight years earlier. I think one reason is that we began by asking the right questions: How can we build a nation and a world of shared benefits and shared responsibilities? How can we accelerate the spread of the positive and reduce the reach of the negative forces that affect us all? What is the proper role of government? What should America expect from and promote in the private sector? What about civil society, the nongovernmental organizations that have been important to us since our founding? How can we appreciate, cultivate, and profit from our diversity while reaffirming that our common humanity and shared values matter more?

  During the campaign of 2010 and for most of the last thirty years, our political debates have not been about answering those questions. Instead, beginning with President Reagan’s campaign in 1980, we have been told that all America’s problems are caused by government, by taxes that are too high, bureaucracies that are too big, regulations that are too costly and intrusive—if we just had less of all that, free people would solve all their problems on their own.

  Americans have always had heated debates about what government should and shouldn’t do. Because we were founded in reaction to the unaccountable and overreaching power of British colonialism, we’ve often been of two minds: we don’t want too much government, but we want enough. How much is enough but not too much is the traditional dividing line between liberals and conservatives. The debate changed in 1980. As President Reagan declared in his first inaugural address, “Government is the problem.” If government is the problem, the question is always, “How can we get less of it?” If you ask the right questions, you may not always get the right answers. But if you ask the wrong questions, you can’t get the right answers.

  I believe the only way we can keep the American Dream alive for all Americans and continue to be the world’s leading force for freedom and prosperity, peace and security, is to have both a strong, effective private sector and a strong, effective government that work together to promote an economy of good jobs, rising incomes, increasing exports, and greater energy independence. All over the world, the most successful nations, including many with lower unemployment rates, less inequality, and, in this decade, even higher college graduation rates than the United States, have both. And they work together, not always agreeing, but moving toward common goals. In other countries, conservatives and liberals also have arguments about taxes, energy policy, bank regulations, and how much government is healthy and affordable, but they tend to be less ideological and more rooted in evidence and experience. They focus more on what works.

  That’s the focus America needs. It’s the only way to get back into the future business. In the modern world, when too few citizens have the time or opportunity to analyze the larger forces shaping our lives, and the lines between news, advocacy, and entertainment are increasingly blurred, ideological conflicts effectively waged may be good politics, and provide fodder for the nightly news, talk shows, and columnists, but they won’t get us to a better future.

  Our long antigovernment obsession has proved to be remarkably successful politics, but its policy failures have given us an anemic, increasingly unequal economy, with too few jobs and stagnant incomes; put us at a competitive disadvantage compared with other nations, especially in manufacturing and clean energy; and left us a potentially crippling debt burden just as the baby boomers begin to retire.

  By contrast, other nations, as well as states and cities within the United States, with a commitment to building networks of cooperation involving the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, are creating economic opportunity and charging into the future with confidence.

  My argument here isn’t that Democrats are always right and Republicans always wrong. It’s that by jamming all issues into the antigovernment, antitax, antiregulation straitjacket, we hog-tie ourselves and keep ourselves from making necessary changes no matter how much evidence exists to support them. The antigovernment paradigm blinds us to possibilities that lie outside its ideological litmus tests and prevents us from creating new networks of cooperation that can restore economic growth, bring economic opportunity to more people and places, and increase our ability to lead the world to a better future.

  To develop an effective strategy to get the jobs engine going again and deal with our long-term debt problem, we have to take off the blinders of antigovernment ideology and focus on what role government must play in America’s renewal.

  * * *

  1 Unlike student loans, Pell Grants don’t have to be repaid. The maximum grant is $5,550 for the 2011–12 academic year, with a student’s actual amount determined by financial need, the cost of attending a particular school, and whether the student is full-time or part-time.

  CHAPTER 2

  The 2010 Election

  and Its Place in the History of

  Antigovernment Politics

  IN THE 2010 ELECTION CYCLE, I agreed to do a number of events, both fund-raisers and rallies, for people who had supported Hillary in the 2008 presidential primaries, because as secretary of state she can’t participate in partisan politics and I wanted to honor their support for her. Somewhere along the way I began trying to help other Democrats too, in what grew to more than 130 events, because I believed President Obama and Congress had done a better job than they were getting credit for and because the Republican proposals to repeal health-care reform, college-loan reform, financial-regulation reform, and clean-energy investments; cancel the unspent stimulus funding; and enact more large tax cuts and big spending cuts across the board represented an even more extreme version of the thirty-year-old antigovernment philosophy that got us into trouble in the first place.

  I tried to explain in plain language what the president and Congress had accomplished in the previous two years and what both parties were proposing to do in the next two. I explained why I thought the Democrats offered America a better chance to revive the economy and create jobs, increase health coverage and quality and slow the rise in health-care costs, prevent future financial meltdowns and more bailouts, reverse the alarming decline in college-graduation rates, and, as the economy recovers, bring our budget back into balance.

  I also tried to get a few laughs to break the tension that hard times bring by joking that my feelings were hurt because I wasn’t the Tea Party’s favorite political figure. After all, during my administration we had four surplus budgets and began to pay down the national debt; we eliminated sixteen thousand pages of federal regulations; we cut taxes on the middle class, working families of modest means, and income from capital gains; we reduced welfare rolls by almost 60 percent; we reduced the size of the federal workforce to its lowest level since 1960, when Dwight Eisenhower was president, and the smallest percentage of the overall workforce since 1933; and the economy produced more jobs (92 percent in the private sector, the largest percentage in fifty years) and moved a hundred times more people out of poverty than in the Reagan years (7.7 million versus 77,000).

  I couldn’t win the Tea Party over, of course, because the actions they agreed with weren’t the whole story. We balanced the budget with a balanced plan: with both spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthiest corporations and individuals (the top 1.2 percent) who had benefited disproportionately from America’s growth and from tax cuts in the 1980s; strengthened regulations to get cleaner air and water and safer food; appointed an SEC commissioner who believed in firm oversight of investment banking practices; set aside more land for preservation in the lower fort
y-eight states than any president since Teddy Roosevelt; added years to Medicare’s and Social Security’s solvency; doubled spending on education, including the largest increase in aid to college students since the GI Bill; spent more on education, transportation, and child care to help people move from welfare to work; achieved almost universal access to the Internet in schools, hospitals, and libraries; doubled investment in biomedical research and created the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the biggest expansion of health coverage since Medicare and Medicaid; created the COPS program, which put 100,000 police on America’s streets; and enacted the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban, leading to the longest continuous drop in crime in our history—all ideological nonstarters for passionate antigovernment advocates, but all good for America.

  Of course, speeches by a former president don’t sway many votes, especially in the face of a disciplined, intense, well-financed campaign, but I tried. The big defeat didn’t surprise me, but it did leave me deeply concerned for the future of our country, because of the leading role played by antigovernment activists, who were sure to interpret the results as an endorsement of their most extreme proposals.

  There were many reasons for the magnitude of the defeat. First, the size of the Democratic majority before 2011 was in large part a reaction to the years of one-party GOP rule, years in which the economy produced very few jobs, mortgage foreclosures exploded, and opposition to the war in Iraq intensified. In 2006, Democrats won back majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994. Then the financial meltdown in September 2008 in effect decided the presidential election and ensured that even more Democrats would go to Congress. Many of those elected in 2006 and 2008 represented districts that were not normally Democratic.