Like the ’90s Never Happened

Bill Clinton ascended to the White House as a New Democrat, wisely repudiating what had been a quarter-century of big-government liberalism and embracing instead welfare reform, deficit reduction, spending restraint, a strong and noninflationary dollar, and free trade. One might thus expect “Back to Work” to be a sharp condemnation of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and, of course, Barack Obama for their abandonment of his centrist policies. After all, today’s Democratic Party—in the wake of the 2006 elections (which elevated Ms. Pelosi to speaker of the House and Mr. Reid to Senate majority leader) and Mr. Obama’s victory in 2008—has run up the national debt to once-unthinkable levels: $4 trillion now, with $10 trillion to come over the next decade. The federal budget has swollen by nearly $1 trillion in five years, or twice as much as spending rose during Mr. Clinton’s eight years in office.

But instead of offering Democrats a road map for a return to the center, “Back to Work” is an ode to big government. It is also a screed against Republican “antigovernment ideologues”—e.g., Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell—who are of course responsible for every problem in the country. It was, Mr. Clinton says, the Republicans’ “thirty-year-old antigovernment philosophy that got us into this crisis.”

Such a broad claim requires—how to put it?—an imaginative approach to history. “After World War II,” Mr. Clinton writes, “until 1981, government policies helped us build the world’s greatest middle class.” Right, everything in America was going great until the voters foolishly elected Ronald Reagan president. In truth, the 1970s were a calamity for American families. One of the biggest three-year declines in real middle-class incomes in the second half of the 20th century came during the stagflation of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The middle class made healthy income gains in the 1980s under Reagan, which helps explain why he was re-elected in a landslide.

Mr. Clinton takes almost sole credit for the budget surpluses in the late 1990s, somehow forgetting that Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had to pass multiple balanced budgets before Mr. Clinton finally signed one. He gushes over the country’s economic performance during his two terms but only once concedes that, much like George W. Bush’s presidency, the Clinton era ended with a crash. The technology bubble burst in late 1999, causing the evisceration of trillions of dollars of wealth and a recession that Mr. Bush had to clean up after. Mr. Clinton attacks Mr. Bush (correctly) for spending too much but then scolds the GOP for preventing Mr. Obama from spending more.

About the policies of Obamanomics—the $830 billion stimulus plan, the auto bailouts, the vast statist apparatus of Obama’s health-care program, the proposed $500 billion jobs program (Stimulus II)—Mr. Clinton has only praise. He seems hardly concerned that spending is now 24% of GDP. (It was below 20% when he left office.) He rails against the budget deficits of Reagan and Mr. Bush, though their deficits, measured as a share of GDP, were roughly a third to a half of Mr. Obama’s.

According to Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama’s ocean of red ink has been nothing but a flood of good intentions and virtuous outcomes. Mr. Clinton almost comically argues that the $2 trillion health-care reform law “is already having a positive effect” by lowering insurance costs, even though more and more businesses are dropping their health coverage in anticipation of Obamacare, and Mr. Obama has already been forced to curtail promised benefits for long-term care because the numbers don’t add up. Mr. Clinton has morphed into such a pro-government enthusiast that he now believes that “a big cut in spending could even increase the deficit, because tax revenues might decrease more than government spending is cut.” So the more you spend, the smaller the deficit. And to think that Democrats make fun of the Laffer Curve.

The core of “Back to Work” is a list of 45 proposals to restore the economy and “get back in the future business.” Some of the proposals are admirably sensible. Mr. Clinton favors an immigration system that allows entry to more high-skilled foreigners; he wants to raise the retirement age for Social Security; he wants to permit American companies to repatriate capital to the U.S. tax-free if they use the money to create jobs here. Perhaps most strikingly, Mr. Clinton urges corporate tax reform to bring the 35% rate down to about 28%. He notes that other countries have aggressively cut their rates and that American companies “like Intel, HP, Microsoft, and Dell” have opened manufacturing plants abroad because of lower rates elsewhere.

But on individual taxes—including those of small-business owners—Mr. Clinton calls for higher rates. In addition he wants a 12% payroll tax applied to high-income earners and an increase in taxes on capital gains and dividends. A president who in 1997 signed a capital-gains tax cut to 20% from 28%—a change that helped to launch an investment boom—now endorses Mr. Obama’s plan to raise the rate to 23.8% from 15%.

And how would Mr. Clinton spend that supposed tax revenue? He wants to see more federal money going to infrastructure, broadband, job training, manufacturing, education, high-speed rail, biofuels, solar and wind energy, among much else. He views nearly everything the government does as an “investment.” That is the industrial-policy model that was popularized in Europe and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. It hasn’t worked out so well.

At one point, Mr. Clinton touts the budget of the “progressive caucus”—a group of the most left-leaning members of the House—whose plan includes $1.5 trillion in new spending, $2 trillion in new taxes, with tax rates as high as 49% and almost no spending cuts outside the military. This from the man who, in his 1996 State of the Union message, told the American people: “The era of big government is over.” “Back to Work” is a painful reminder that big government is back with a vengeance.

Mr. Moore is a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.