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Summary
Summary
President Bill Clinton gives us his views on the challenges facing the United States today and why government matters--presenting his ideas on restoring economic growth, job creation, financial responsibility, resolving the mortgage crisis, and pursuing a strategy to get us "back in the future business." He explains how we got into the current economic crisis, and offers specific recommendations on how we can put people back to work, increase bank lending and corporate investment, double our exports, restore our manufacturing base, and create new businesses. He supports President Obama's emphasis on green technology, saying that changing the way we produce and consume energy is the strategy most likely to spark a fast-growing economy while enhancing our national security.
Clinton also stresses that we need a strong private sector and a smart government working together to restore prosperity and progress, demonstrating that whenever we've given in to the temptation to blame government for all our problems, we've lost our ability to produce sustained economic growth and shared prosperity.
Clinton writes, "There is simply no evidence that we can succeed in the twenty-first century with an antigovernment strategy," based on "a philosophy grounded in 'you're on your own' rather than 'we're all in this together.' " He believes that conflict between government and the private sector has proved to be good politics but has produced bad policies, giving us a weak economy with not enough jobs, growing income inequality and poverty, and a decline in our competitive position. In the real world, cooperation works much better than conflict, and "Americans need victories in real life."
Author Notes
William Jefferson Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe IV on August 19, 1946 in Hope, Arkansas. His father, an automobile parts salesman, was killed in a car accident three months before he was born. At the age of fifteen, Bill changed his name to that of his stepfather Roger's as a gesture of goodwill to both him and his mother. Clinton attended Hot Springs High School where he was very active in the student government, among other things. In 1963, Clinton was chosen to attend the American Legion Boys State, a government and leadership conference in Little Rock, where he was elected a senator and given the opportunity to go to Washington D. C. and meet President John F. Kennedy. Clinton attended Georgetown University after he graduated from high school, where he majored in International Studies. He interned for Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, and with him became an opponent of the Vietnam War. Clinton won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford where he studied for two years before attending the University of Arkansas Law School. There he was issued a draft letter and joined ROTC, but was never called up since he received a high number for the draft lottery.
In 1970, Clinton entered Yale Law School and worked for George McGovern's presidential campaign in 1972. He graduated from Yale in 1973, and worked for a short time in D. C. as a staff attorney for the House Judiciary Committee. In 1974, Clinton entered his first political race, against Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt, losing to the Congressman by 2 percent. In 1976, he was elected Arkansas Attorney General and in '78 ran for Arkansas Governor, winning the race 63% to 37%. He lost the reelection two years later because of Cuban refugee issues, but regained the title in 1982, and held it till he became President in 1993.
Bill Clinton announced his run for President on October 3, 1991, and with Al Gore as his Vice President, took office on January 20, 1993 at the age of 46. He was one of the youngest men to hold the office of President and the first Democrat to be elected since 1976. As President, Clinton worked on health care reform, cut federal spending, created jobs, reduced the deficit and enacted the Assault Weapon Ban as part of the Crime Bill. He also helped Israel and Jordan achieve a peace treaty, enabled a peace accord between Israel and Palestine and contributed to the cease fire in Northern Ireland. Clinton stepped down from the Presidency in 2000 to make way for George W. Bush, and established himself in offices in Harlem, New York City, New York, while his wife was elected to the U.S. Senate, representing New York State.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bill Clinton may be a busier man these days than he was during his time in office. In this compelling ode to all things American, Clinton offers his take on what's gone wrong in the United States over the past 30 years-everything from the lack of jobs to the mortgage crisis-and how to fix these ills. As the former president so elegantly puts it, "I want American Dream growth." Clinton's narrative tone is that of a seasoned orator, and his inherent ability to command an audience is undiminished. His voice bears a certain weight and wisdom that can only develop after a full life spent on the campaign trail and in the White House. Clinton's America is one that is not as doomed as some would make it out to be, and, as he points out early on, we're all in this together. A Knopf hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Where's Bill Clinton when you need him? After all, he left the country with a budget surplus, kept taxes under 10 percent of GDP, and kept spending under 19 percent. Well, he's right here in the pages of this book, and in clear yet thoughtful language, he explains not only how we got into this financial mess but how we can get out of it. Unlike those still in the political ring, he has no problem with stating his views: global climate change is here, and much of it is man-made. Without dealing with entitlements, we will never sustain economic growth. Government is an important part of the recovery, and those who want starve it into oblivion have no idea what they're talking about. In fact, one of the most interesting parts of the book is Clinton's analysis of how the country became so enamored with the idea that government is bad, a notion that he rebuts forcefully. At the heart of the book is Clinton's step-by-step, commonsensical plan for climbing out of the the financial quagmire and getting the country back to work. For those who really want to argue solutions, not simply throw around invectives, this is a great place to start.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BILL CLINTON'S new book, "Back to Work," is less a bold plan to create jobs than it is a passionate rebuttal of "our 30-year antigovernment obsession." That obsession, he insists, is public enemy No. 1. He also seems to be sending a barely disguised message to Barack Obama to join him in confronting the antigovernment chorus. But coming from a former president who contributed to that very antigovernment narrative in the 1990s, it is unsurprising that the substance of the case he makes is weaker than it should be. In his State of the Union address in 1996, Clinton told us with a sense of triumph that the "era of big government is over." By absorbing the new American distaste for government after the Republican Congressional victory of 1994, he assured his re-election two years later. And in his second term Clinton was more concerned about restraining government spending and paying down the debt than investing in America. Clinton now seems to believe the orthodoxy has finally gone too far. He argues that antigovernment zeal led to President Bush's deep tax cuts in the early 2000s. Those cuts, he tells us, are a major cause of today's budget deficits, while the stubborn reluctance of Republicans to agree to any tax increases at all has brought the political process to a near halt. For all the Republican arguments, Clinton says, America did not get a better economy with the Bush tax cuts. According to the Economic Cycle Research Institute, growth in personal income even before the Great Recession was slower under Bush than in any equivalent period since World War II. In the years he was president, Clinton proudly notes, America produced more than 22 million jobs. George Bush's America created only 2.5 million jobs. The Great Recession, which ended six months after Obama took office, cost America roughly eight million jobs. As Clinton says, President Obama inherited not only the Great Recession but a trillion-dollar deficit thanks in good part to those tax cuts. And now the nation is in the grips of a torpid economy laden with debt and a high rate of both unemployment and underemployment - those who want and cannot get full-time jobs - that appears intransigent. Despite the recent boom in corporate profits, the typical family's income is below its level in the late 1990s. Clinton traces the antigovernment attitudes to Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. But in fact, the turn in America's attitudes goes back to the economic wreckage of the mid-1970s, when inflation and unemployment simultaneously soared and budget deficits were first starting to raise alarms. America was still a moderately progressive country in the early '70s: citizens supported social programs and voted down efforts to cut taxes. But by the end of the decade, a full-fledged tax revolt had gotten under way, led by the overwhelming passage in 1978 of Proposition 13 in California, which cut property taxes sharply, and the growing Congressional support for the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which proposed cutting federal income taxes by 30 percent Even before Reagan's victory, no institution, it seemed, was distrusted more than government. Yet Clinton concentrates only on the damage done since 2001. He believes that he bequeathed a healthy economy to Bush and that the tax cuts undid it. After all, Clinton's major legislative achievement was to raise income taxes on the well-off in 1993. The higher taxes relieved the long-exaggerated concerns about the inflationary consequences of a growing deficit. Interest rates started to recede and the economy took off, the unemployment rate ultimately falling to 4 percent by the year 2000. Many conservatives predicted a weakening economy and they were dead wrong. But there were other contributing factors besides Clinton's tax increases. Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve sharply raised interest rates in 1994, which was a main source of falling inflationary expectations. Meantime, government spending was dampened because health care costs grew slowly as a result of the rise of H.M-O.'s. Because the cold war had ended, military spending fell as a percent of G.D.P. Perhaps most important, the Internet boom began and sparked a stock market bubble that stimulated spending by consumers, who felt ever richer. Along the way, Clinton did pass important social legislation, like the expansion of the earned income tax credit and a family leave act, but his administration's investments in education and infrastructure were modest compared with the growth in the economy - and so were the results. In 1998, for example, the Society of Civil Engineers gave a grade to America's infrastructure of D. In 2001, after the Clinton investments, the grade assigned was D+. Clinton writes in "Back to Work" that the nation could have eliminated debt completely by 2013 if the Bush administration stuck to his deficit reduction plan. But why was this ever his plan? Should a C.E.O. brag that he can eliminate all his company's debt, or should he be investing in the future? Clinton sidesteps his role in financial deregulation. He admits he should have taken steps to control derivatives, the highly leveraged securities that were at the heart of the 2008 crisis, though he says his decision to end the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal legislation that separated commercial and investment banks, did not create the crisis. But in fact repeal led directly to the rise of huge financial institutions whose managers believed they could take on both highly risky investments and enormous debt as well. And his administration, along with many Congressional Democrats, was consistently soft on Wall Street in other areas at a time when there were numerous accountirig frauds, scams to sell high-technology new issues and hot money racing around the world to find easy profits, destabilizing foreign economies in the process. It is no surprise, then, that there is no Roosevelt moment in "Back to Work" -nothing equivalent to a new New Deal. Clinton's jobs plan is largely a repetition of Obama's recent recommendations, which include a temporary cut in payroll taxes and a reversal of the Bush tax cuts for the well-off. He also calls for an aggressive program to relieve mortgage debt All this is a decent start, but not very likely to be enough. Without explanation, Clinton backs proposals to balance the budget that seem to depend significantly more on spending reductions than tax increases (he never makes the calculation). He would make some cuts in Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit. He would cut military spending, but only cautiously. Always a good policy wonk, he knows that America's true fiscal problems are the rising costs of health care, not Medicare and Medicaid themselves, but he continues to propose cutting entitlements spending. The 1990s Clinton is still talking. MOST disappointing, for a man who warns us that America is falling behind other rich nations for lack of public investment, he makes no major proposal to raise taxes significantly once the economy is back on track. He tantalizingly points out that reversing all of the Bush tax cuts, including for the middle class, would come close to restoring an adequately balanced budget over the next 10 years. But he doesn't advocate this. He mentions the possible need for a value-added tax - a national sales tax - while he is at best ambivalent about a financial transactions tax. His recommendations on transportation investment are merely to doff his cap to an infrastructure bank and a few well-worn energy initiatives. These are the big-issue problems America must ultimately face but, like most of Washington, he pushes them down, the road. Many inside the Beltway welcome Clinton's modest pragmatism. They think it politically realistic. But if those few people who have a national megaphone - like a former president - don't use it to" influence and change America's thinking, who will? The nation badly needs a counter-narrative to the antigovernment orthodoxy Clinton describes. His is welcome. But even if we adopted all of his suggestions, America would still have a long way to go. America did not get a better economy with Bush's tax cuts, despite what Republicans say, Clinton argues. Jeff Madrick's latest book is "Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present."
Kirkus Review
Giving, 2007, etc.) writes that he had conceived this book but then shelved it several times "because politics is no longer the center of my working life"--and, he continues, "I don't just want to add another stone to the Democratic side of the partisan scale." An apolitical, nonpartisan Clinton? Fat chance, and here, with considerable appetite, he tears into the antigovernment opposition, the ones who assert, with Ronald Reagan, that government is part of the problem, if not the problem. Nonsense, Clinton argues: Government has many roles, not least an economic one in assuring that the political and social conditions are fitting to a robust economy. Besides, he writes, despite what that opposition is saying, the recent banking meltdown happened because the banks were overleveraged. The government helped avert a full-scale depression, and the stimulus helped "put a floor under the collapse and begin the recovery." The opposition--he keeps returning to it--may appear to be antigovernment, but it's really antitax and antiregulation, two things that simply don't make sense in the current economic climate. In good political form, Clinton begins with generalities about what a good country this could be and what's wrong with it--all those antigovernment talking heads, for one thing, who "already have the answers, and the fact that the evidence doesn't support them is irrelevant." Happily, though, he moves on to pointed specifics, some honed in policy-wonkish detail--on, for example, relaxing mortgage debt, developing a renewable energy regime and getting small businesses into the exporting game ("This is what Germany does"). Vintage Clinton, with provocative if generally evenhanded solutions to the economic crisis and political stalemate plaguing the country.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Clinton has done the impossible: created a book on political economics for people who hate political economics. Despite occasional lapses into such wonky terms as agricultural derivatives, our former President tackles the many problems facing America today with some creative solutions. He lucidly states the reasons why the antigovernment movement is not the direction America should follow if it wants to change successfully and explains how responsible government can tackle such thorny subjects as the housing crisis, the ever-increasing deficit, and the stagnant job market. VERDICT Clinton does an admirable job narrating, and although he won't convince everyone that his solutions would work, he gives people much to think about. This audiobook belongs in every public and academic library. ["Political junkies and concerned citizens, willing to wade through many anecdotal examples accompanied by confusing charts and statistics, may find merit in the call for greater public-private sector cooperation," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Knopf hc, LJ XPress Reviews, 11/8/11.-Ed.]-Joseph L. Carlson, Vandenberg Air Force Base Lib., Lompoc, CA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| Part I Where We Are | |
| 1 Our Thirty-Year Antigovernment Obsession | p. 3 |
| 2 The 2010 Election and Its Place in the History of Antigovernment Politics | p. 19 |
| 3 Why We Need Government | p. 48 |
| 4 So What About the Debt? | p. 55 |
| 5 How Are We Doing Compared with Our Own Past and with Today's Competition? | p. 84 |
| Part II What We Can Do | |
| 6 How Do We Get Back in the Future Business? | p. 117 |
| Epilogue: Time to Choose | p. 188 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 195 |
