Mostly because the point I’m about to make is in agreement (sort of) with reflexively anti-anything-involving-a-Democrat types. Over at Pandagon:

I’ll have to find it, but one of the funniest Bush-era critiques of Clinton’s policies was that we would have grown even faster if not for Clinton. Since there was no demonstrable failure in a large-scale economic sense, Clinton’s policies (particularly the tax cut) were simply an anchor on the speedboat that was the 90s. Luckily, since there was nothing that actually existed to point to, the author could just throw out larger numbers than the 90s economic growth figures, and call it a thesis.

I just finished up Contours of Descent by Robert Pollin, a terrific book. He analyzes the Clinton boom, among other things. His conclusion is that the primary factor behind it was the stock market and the corresponding jump in spending by people whose net worth went up. This jump was almost completely confined to the rich; the top 20% income group jumped up from spending 95.1% of their personal disposable income to spending 104.4%. The next highest income group went up by 1.6%, the other three dropped by .1%, 2.9%, and 2.3%, respectively. So it does follow that if Clinton hadn’t raised taxes on the top 2% or whatever it was, that group may have had more to spend and the economy may have grown even faster. However, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference to most people.

Of course, I may have mangled Pollin’s economics in there somewhere, and I’m not an economist, so take that as you will.