Clinton says no tax hikes and no new regulations

Former President Bill Clinton has some choice advice for Obama. Primarily, he thinks that Obama would have been better off if he had just stopped talking after his address to Congress:

[Bill Clinton] explains: “In the speech that the president gave to Congress, he didn’t propose any new taxes. The speech was $250 billion in tax cuts, $250 billion in spending over a period of two to three years. It focused mostly on a rather innovative set of payroll tax cuts and incentives to hire people.

“I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending until we get this economy off the ground. If we cut government spending, which I normally would be very inclined to do when the deficit’s this big, with interest rates already near zero you can’t get the benefits out of it.

“So what I’d like to see them do is come up with a bipartisan approach, starting with the payroll tax cuts because they have the biggest return.

“Then what I’d like to see is an effort made at a bipartisan resolution of the banking home mortgage crisis.

“One of the things that President Reagan did with the Democratic Congress in the early 1980s that never gets any discussion is the way they set up this system to purge the debt overhang from the savings and loan collapse. It was unpopular but it had to be done. And as soon as we flushed it out there was a big increase in investment.

“So that’s what we need to do here with this home deal. I don’t think you can tax or cut taxes, I don’t think you can spend or not spend enough to get America back to a full employment economy until we flush that debt.

Read more on Newsmax.com: Ex-President Clinton to Newsmax: Raising Taxes Won't Work
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“What I find is a lot of business people can be supportive of new regulations and new standards, but particularly in a fragile time they don’t like to have too many things changing at once.

“A business can’t do five things at once and decide whether to get back into the investment business after it’s slow. It may be that there is a way, for example, to stagger out a way things are going to be done under the Dodd-Frank bill.

“The really important thing about Dodd-Frank, that we had to do to establish our financial bone fides again, was to have capital requirements on banks and investment banks so we have leverage limits.” . . .