Bill Clinton’s reputation has been taking hits faster than the Japanese carriers did at Midway, but the damage he did was not only at the national level. In this article, my old friend Greg Kaza, formerly a member of the Michigan House who now heads up our sister think tank in Arkansas, observes that Arkansas still suffers from the effects of tax increases Clinton rammed through twenty years ago.
Clinton’s rhetoric then — that tax increases were needed in order to finance government “investments” that would produce economic growth — is the same nonsense we got from him as president, and the same as we hear from statists all the time. But you can’t pull an economy up by its bootstraps by transferring more resources from the private sector, where they are usually put to sensible use, to the government, which squanders them on political boondoggles.
