There was a subtle subtext in this whole debate leading up to the New Year’s fiscal cliff resolution. The Democrats were clever to champion raising taxes on top wage earners to “Clinton era” levels.
Like a freshly roasted rabbit leading the greyhounds around the racetrack, the Republicans took the bait and ran with it.
Ah, the glorious Clinton era. Images of infinite wealth conjure a spectacle of glittering mountains of priceless diamonds in the minds of conservatives. Double digit GDP growth. Double digit profit growth. Triple digit hedge fund growth. It’s the holy of holies!
Another spurt of growth like that and our debt will be paid off and the Democrats can have all the god damned people they want on welfare, Medicare and food stamps. Obamacare is a small price to pay for the kind of wealth generation that would happen at the top 2 percent. Glory of glories!
Of course, the tech boom was a total anomaly. Industrial revolutions like that only come around once a millennium, if that. Just think of what happened during the Clinton era – the internet, cell phones, broadband, PCs powerful enough to run a thousand new applications, iPhones, iTunes, iPads and Dellionaires (people in central Texas who invested in Dell computers and made a bloody fortune.)
All this is embodied in the two words “Clinton-era.” It’s like reminiscing about the Civil War in the Old South, about the Revolutionary War in the Old North, about World War II in the Pentagon. The glory days.
When I think of the Clinton era I think of Bill Clinton dropping his pants to let Monica Lewinski suck on his privates. I think of her smearing his semen on her blue dress as a keepsake.
I think of decadence out of control. Lies! “I did not have sex with that woman.”
Rome. Nero. Fiddles. Fire.
