It was a long, miserable eight years, but Bubba Clinton at last checked out of the White House.
After seemingly-endless fanfares, photo-ops, "farewell" speeches and pretty much a national "good-bye" tour, the Celebrity-in-Chief turned over the keys to the executive mansion, forfeited his damage deposit, and moved on to chase skirts in new territory.
Even before Clinton begrudgingly moved across town to his wife's new digs, the liberal spinmeisters, hacks, pundits, and party loyalists began painting a supremely-rosy picture of his myriad of "accomplishments."
We heard more tripe, spin, and outright lies about this outgoing chief executive than any other in history, most of it propagated by the Commander-in-Heat himself.
Let's examine some of the outrageous claims made by Clinton and his minions, and let's then compare them with the facts:
Myth #1:
"Bill Clinton was responsible for eight long years of unprecedented economic expansion."
The Truth:
When Bill Clinton took office, unemployment nationally stood at 7.3 percent, and when he left, the rate had dropped to 4.0 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Index stood at 3754 at the end of Clinton's first year in office, and had climbed to 10,787 by the end of 2000. NASDAQ rose from 777 at the end of 1993 to a record 2471 at the close of 2000.
Clinton credits all of this to his 1993 tax increase, the largest in American history.
Wrong.
Clinton's first two years in office were an economic bust, primarily because his massive tax increase nearly broke the backs of American workers and took nearly all of the wind out of the sails of the economic recovery begun by George Bush.
Both the Dow Jones Industrial Index and NASDAQ lost value in the two years between the 1992 and 1994 elections, America's poverty rate didn't budge one iota, and all across the nation, household incomes fell markedly. In his wildest dreams, Clinton, the consummate optimist, couldn't foresee any change -- his own budget projections pointed to nothing but insurmountable deficits well into the next century.
The impetus behind the 1995 economic turnaround can be attributed to only one real factor: changes brought about as a result of the Republican-controlled House and Senate elected in 1994.
The GOP can't rightly take the laurels for economic growth, as 100% of the actual work was done by American citizens. But the changes in Clinton policy dictated by the newly-conservative Congress provided all of the initiative that we Americans needed.
During 1994, the final year of Democratic congressional control, the Dow rose a pathetic 80 points and NASDAQ in fact fell 25. Under the first year of Republican leadership, the Dow leaped an astounding 1,283 points and NASDAQ managed to rise 300.
Under Clinton's continued "leadership," the economy faltered as the end of his second term approached. This sharp downturn was caused by two factors, one of which was entirely Clinton's doing.
First, the world's investment community woke up and realized that the hundreds of "dot-com" companies in which it had invested so heavily were little more than smoke and mirrors.
Secondly, Bill Clinton ordered the destruction of Microsoft.
Literally within a matter of days, millions of Americans lost billions of dollars in investments and savings as Microsoft's stock plummeted in value. The good-times bubble popped, and NASDAQ lost more than half of its worth in less than a year's time. Similarly, the Dow lost more than 20 percent of its accumulated value. Together, the two markets lost almost $2 trillion (that's "trillion" with a "t"), sending the economy sliding downward.
So the liberal's claim that Clinton led us into a "period of unprecedented economic expansion" is total bunk. His tenure was marked at both the beginning and the end with economic despair across the land, a far cry from "expansion."
Myth#2:
http://www.dixieline.homestead.com/Legacy02.html