| mrstickball said: Every president should be viewed under the microscope of what they made and did well after they leave office. As some have said, Clinton was a pretty crappy caretaker president that really didn't do anything great, or anything far too horrible (although I'd argue he mis-handled his opportunities). |
When Clinton took over, the economy was on auto-pilot. We had just finished the Gulf War, and history shows that the economy gets a big boost at the end of a successful military campaign. We were also going through the dot com boom, which saw literally tens of millions of jobs being created in a very short time. Companies like AOL, eBay, and Amazon were rapidly expanding throughout his presidency. The the effects of Reagan's economic policies had not completely worn off yet (inflation was down, taxes were down, GDP was up, interest rates were down, unemployment was down, and read median family income was up).
By the end of the Clinton years we were teetering on the brink of recession. The NASDAQ crashed, the dot com bubble popped towards the end of his recession, and we experienced two nonconsecutive quarters of negative growth. The recession didn't become official until after the September 11th attacks, but the problems were set in motion long before Bush took over.
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