Call it what you will, the economy under Bush is a train wreck. Under Clinton? I defy you to characterize it as anything but "booming".

hey focused on the economy throughout both terms in a way that has been described as "laser like"

1. The Clinton Administration forged a bipartisan coalition to pass NAFTA after concluding tough negotiations on side agreements covering workers' rights, the environment, and import surges.
Exports to Mexico rose 23 percent in the first 11 months of 1994.

During the debate on passage of NAFTA, U.S. citizens were promised 200,000 new jobs each year because of NAFTA as well as a growing U.S. trade surplus. However, after five years the results have not lived up to the promises.
Though the promise was made that there would be mutual job creation in both the United States and Mexico, most new jobs are found in Mexico. As of late 1997, the estimate of net U.S. job losses due to NAFTA was 400,000. Some measures of job losses and gains place the losses at 800,000 and the gains at 400,000. A disproportionately high 24,000 jobs were lost in Michigan alone.

2. President Clinton led the fight to pass GATT, which lowered tariffs worldwide by $744 billion over a ten year period -- the largest international tax cut in history. GATT cut tariffs on manufactured goods by more than one-third overall and eliminated tariffs in major markets in a number of sectors in which the U.S. is particularly competitive.

In 1990 Ohio was the proud home of 96 steel companies. Our latest count finds only 76 steel companies remaining. Within the past 12 months, five of our leading steel producers have declared bankruptcy or closed.
Company
Status
Jobs lost or threatened

LTV Chapter 11
1,600 lost
5,000 threatened

Republic Technologies
Chapter 11
1,000 lost
4,700 threatened*

Wheeling-Pitt
Chapter 11
1,000 lost
2,300 threatened

CSC
Closed
1,100 lost

American Steel & Wire
Closed
200 lost

The importance of these companies extends beyond their current sales and employees. Ohio's steel industry funds the pensions and health insurance for thousands of employees and their families. Ohio's steel companies contribute $861 million in taxes to the state and local government in Ohio, and $1.34 billion in federal taxes. Further reductions in workforce and losses of solid corporate citizens cannot be tolerated in Ohio or in this nation.

Let me be clear, this crisis is not about losing one or two companies, it is about losing an industry and a way of life for generations of Ohio families.

3. As part of the 1993 Economic Plan, President Clinton cut taxes on 15 million low-income families and made tax cuts available to 90 percent of small businesses, while raising taxes on just 1.2 percent of the wealthiest taxpayers.
Passed without one Republican vote, which helped start the Clinton Miracle and was reversed by Bush II.

In fact, as former Treasury Department economist Aldona Robbins points out, the economic recovery from the 1990-91 recession that occurred under Clinton's watch was "less robust than earlier ones." During President George Bush's last year in office, the economy grew by more than 3 percent after inflation. During Clinton's first year in office, the year of the tax increase, economic growth slid to 2.6 percent. Under the burden of Clinton's "new economic strategy," the economy slogged along at the slowest pace ever following a recession until after the Republicans assumed control of the Congress in 1995.

Fortunately, the Fed reversed itself after initially accommodating the Clinton tax hike with inflationary monetary policy, and inflation was squelched. As ing-Barings economist Larry Kudlow puts it, "This inflation decline amounted to an economy-wide tax cut that in effect overwhelmed Clinton's 1993 tax hike."

Then, in 1997, over objections by the Clinton administration, Congress enacted and convinced the president to sign a real capital gains tax cut to accompany the "inflation tax cut," and the economy took off, growing in excess of 4 percent annually ever since. As a result, between the start of the economic recovery and the beginning of this year, real economic output increased a total of 36 percent.