and i am not sure that is true. i think what defeated president bush was the state of the economy and the perceived state of the economy. right. coming out of the ace recession at the time and but you know how recessions are better than anyone. the effects linger long after it is over. and he was in the middle of that. and what bill clinton inherited was really the bush recovery. but the unemployment rate was up a bit and confidence was down and it was a dark moment and people were ready for a change and he had been, president bush 41 was so preoccupied with his role on the world stage and i think a lot of people thought he did not really care about the economy. and he ran sort of a semi-halfhearted campaign. i think he felt like in a way his heart was not in it.
yes, i think that s an important part. it s not everything. jenna: josh, what do you think? is that priority number one? yeah, more tax cuts aimed at high income households, i don t see that as a big priority. we kind of ran that experiment in the early 2000s. the bush recovery was really anemic. i think there s wage stagnation, climate change is a higher priority issue. the idea that so much time is e spent on taxes, that seems like a real distraction to me. jenna: maya, your thoughts? i think one of the keys to grow the economy is to actually get our budget and our debt under control. reforming the tax code is a big piece of that if it s done right. but one of the things we ve seen from the candidates and we heard a bit about last night is these tax plans would lose trillions of dollars of debt or add trillions in revenue, add to the debt just at a time where we re on track to add $9 trillion to the debt over the next president s term assuming two
the second bar from the right during this recovery when the economy has been getting better 95% of every additional dollar earned in this country went to the top 1%. 5% went to the other 99%. 32% went to the top .01%, that s 35,000 americans got 32% of all the income gains in the economy. what you see in this chart the green bars are recoveries, the chinn recovery during the 90s, the bush recovery during the 2000s and now the most recent one. in each recovery the percent going to the wealthiest has gone up. how and why is this happening? a series of complicated questions. a lot has to do with globalization, the top 1% has the skills that allow them to compete in the modern world. the people at the bottom being pushed down by global forces cutting wages. a lot of it is financial
than they were last year. unemployment rate didn t drop. spending consumer spending didn t do anything there. nothing happened. it was just like people got the extra money but nothing really happened to him. you know what? because gas prices went up and that evaporated and took all the money away from the folks. number two, if you knock out deductions for affluent people what do you think is going to happen to the home industry? if you can t deduct your home mortgage what do you think is going to happen? boom,going to totally collapse, is it not? first of all limiting deductions to 28% and only applies to upper income americans. bill: who do you think is buying all the big properties? it s not going to have a huge effect at all, you know, most people are not going to be affected by this at all. and to the extent that upper income people are, it s just limited to 28%. now, by the way, this recovery is much better recovery in terms of private sector employment than the bush recover
than they were last year. unemployment rate didn t drop. spending consumer spending didn t do anything there. nothing happened. it was just like people got the extra money but nothing really happened to him. you know what? because gas prices went up and that evaporated and took all the money away from the folks. number two, if you knock out deductions for affluent people what do you think is going to happen to the home industry? if you can t deduct your home mortgage what do you think is going to happen? boom,going to totally collapse, is it not? first of all limiting deductions to 28% and only applies to upper income americans. bill: who do you think is buying all the big properties? it s not going to have a huge effect at all, you know, most people are not going to be affected by this at all. and to the extent that upper income people are, it s just limited to 28%. now, by the way, this recovery is much better recovery in terms of private sector employment than the bush recover