Hillary Clinton: How the White House has destroyed America's finances

From a speech given by the junior senator from New York on the Republicans' handling of the US economy

Ever since they won the Congress in 1994, right through the presidential campaign of 2000 and the past year-and-a-half of this administration, the Republican economic strategy has consisted of two things: bigger tax cuts and weaker regulations.

That is the answer to everything, no matter what ails you. It's like the old medicine man, "Here, I've got a pill for rheumatism; I've got a pill for headaches." It's just the same pill, it's a placebo. It has no compounds that are going to make a difference to anybody. But they believe that over and over again they can come up with bigger tax cuts and weaker regulation and believe that they have solved, not just a political problem but a substantive one.

Last year they asked that Congress pass their big tax cuts before we had a budget, before we knew what emergencies would arise, before we had an economic forecast that reflected the slowdown. As a result, we've gone from paying down the debt and securing the retirement of the baby boomers to red ink as far as the eye can see and back to raiding social security and Medicare for tax cuts for the wealthy.

When President Clinton's Securities & Exchange Commission chairman, Arthur Levitt, warned in 1998 about dangerous accounting practices and the conflict presented by the same accounting firms keeping the books and being management consultants, the Republicans literally laughed at him. When he tried to stop the practice, they stopped him. When this administration took office, they appointed one of the accounting industry's lawyers to chair a "kinder and gentler" SEC.

When the former treasury secretary Larry Summers tried to limit abuses of offshore accounts, the GOP stopped him. When President Clinton vetoed the so-called Securities Reform Bill because it almost completely cut off the ability of ordinary investors to sue insiders who defraud them, they overrode the veto. And when Democrats like Paul Sarbanes proposed tough new corporate reforms, what do you think would've happened if the Republicans still controlled the Senate?