REVIEW OF THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION

A couple good reviews from The Wall Street Journal. One on their stated foreign policy by Claudia Rosett and the other below:

That '90s Show
A return to Clintonism wouldn't be a return to peace and prosperity.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
EDITORIAL
Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Ah, the glorious, roaring 1990s. Bill Clinton got elected, raised taxes on the rich so that the budget deficit and interest rates fell, and thus kicked off one of the great booms in economic history. Then Al Gore lost the 2000 election--sorry, had it stolen--President Bush cut taxes, and the economy more or less immediately went to hell.

In case you've missed the speeches, this is one of the major story lines emerging from this week's Democratic conclave in Boston. As Mr. Clinton boasted in his Monday stemwinder, he left America in 2001 with "peace and prosperity." So elect John Kerry, we are told, and he'll take us back to the Clinton policies, starting once again with a tax increase that will reduce the deficit and return us to the happy days before Osama bin Laden, Enron, and the "middle-class squeeze."

This all sounds so good that even we'd like to believe it. There's just the small matter that it isn't even close to being the real economic history of the 1990s. Allow us to recall a few of the missing details amid this nostalgia trip, starting with the fact that the Clinton years began by inheriting a recovery that was finally gathering steam. The economy grew by more than 4% in 1992, including 4.5% in the fourth quarter, too late to re-elect George H.W. Bush but enough to give the Clinton era a running start.

Mr. Clinton did pass a tax increase in the summer of 1993, but only after Senate Democrats stripped out his new BTU tax and Senate Republicans killed his spending "stimulus." The expansion stumbled in early 1993, no doubt partly on tax-hike uncertainty, then revived late in the year. In 1994 stock markets were flat but interest rates actually rose throughout the year, peaking on the very day in 1994 that Republicans took Congress. That turned out to be the real start of the 1990s boom.

.....

Then the bubble burst--not in 2001, but starting in 2000. The tech-heavy Nasdaq peaked in March of Bill Clinton's final year in office. The National Bureau of Economic Research now says the economy shrank by 0.5% in the third quarter of 2000--albeit too late for voters to feel it that November. After a fourth quarter blip in growth, the economy slipped into recession by the formal definition (at least two consecutive quarters of declining GDP) in the first half of 2001. (full article)