Nearly one in five voters that year cast a ballot for an eccentric billionaire from Texas, Ross Perot, whose mantra was that the NAFTA free trade agreement negotiated by Reagan/Bush but also supported by the newly baptized DLC chair Clinton would lead to "a giant sucking sound from the South" as factories and jobs moved to Mexico.
Clinton suggested that blue-collar jobs weren't the future of America, and his running mate, Al Gore, said that moving automotive and other factories to Mexico would actually be good for America because Mexican workers would no longer have an incentive to cross our southern border and "we [could] cut down on illegal immigration."
The Democratic Party now led by Clinton thus embraced a behavior that most working Americans knew would be a disaster for them, and that they had cried out loudly against with their Perot vote in 1992.
Over the next eight years, as Clinton ignored them, many began considering having another affair with the GOP. After all, if Clinton was going to embrace Reagan/Bush trade policies, why not just go right to the source -- the GOP itself -- for policy prescriptions.
According to Bob Woodward, during a meeting in the Oval Office, Clinton said sarcastically, "Where are all the Democrats? I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans."
He added, "We're Eisenhower Republicans here. Here we are, and we're standing for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?"
Further turning his back on the FDR/LBJ Democratic Party principles, Clinton went on to heartily embrace Republican policies of cutting the social safety net. "The era of big government is over," he proclaimed.
Putting the knife hilt-deep into the spine of LBJ's Great Society, Clinton said, "Today we are ending welfare as we know it" as he signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. That law undid much of LBJ's Great Society legislation, which had succeeded in cutting poverty rates in America from 22.2 percent in 1963 down to 12.6 percent in 1970.
For the first time since LBJ's Great Society in the 1960s, families in poverty were not guaranteed a lifeline. They had to prove they were working in order to qualify for assistance, which sounded like a good idea in theory, especially during boom times like the '90s, when there were lots of jobs available. But during recessions, when three or four people are looking for every one available job, a work requirement for welfare does a lot of harm to already struggling families.
The stats have borne this out. In the years after welfare reform, as a series of presidents and governors have followed in Clinton's footsteps, ever more people have been kicked off benefits, while poverty has increased. Before Clinton's "welfare reform," roughly 70 percent of impoverished families had access to a lifeline. But after reform, by 2016, only 23 percent did, and in some states that number was below 10 percent.
Meanwhile, the Reagan Revolution's trade policy was wiping out the industrial base of America, while its tax policies were simultaneously moving trillions of dollars in wealth from middle-class families into the pockets of the top 1 percent.
The year Reagan was sworn in, we were the richest nation in the world, and other than a few wobbles during the Civil War and two World Wars, our national debt had been relatively steady in inflation-adjusted dollars since the administration of George Washington. We were the world's largest creditormore countries owed us money than any other nation on earth.
Today, after nearly 40 years of neoliberal Reaganomics, we are the world's largest debtor nation, and our national debt nearly outweighs our annual GDP.
The year Reagan was sworn into office, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world, and the world's largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. We brought in ores for manufacturing, and shipped out everything from TVs and computers to cars and clothing.
Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world's mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world's largest importer of finished, manufactured goods. We've gone from trade surpluses to trade deficits, a reflection of the fact that our factory floors had moved to Asia and Mexico.
In 1960, about one in four Americans worked in manufacturing, producing things of lasting wealth for our nation. Today, after jumping headfirst into one free-trade agreement after another, fewer than one in 10 Americans work in manufacturing.
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