The Clinton boom was undoubtedly a continuation of the Reagan boom. I attribute much of the economic success of the Clinton era to the spending discipline of Newt Gingrich and his “contract with America” Reagan republicans who talked ol’ Bubba into signing the balanced budget bill, welfare reform, NAFTA and capital gains tax cuts. Everybody benefited from the implosion of the USSR and the resulting ‘peace dividend’ of massive cuts in defense spending.

Clinton’s greatest economic triumph was actually the fact most of his liberal policy ideas were never enacted. Princeton university examined the theory that the economy does better under democratic administrations in a 2014 study and found it wanting:

“Democrats would no doubt like to attribute the large [Democrat-Republican] growth gap to macroeconomic policy choices, but the data do not support such a claim. If anything, and we would not make too much of small differences, both fiscal and monetary policy actions seem to be a bit more stabilizing when a Republican is president — even though Federal Reserve chairmen appointed by Democrats preside over faster growth than Federal Reserve chairmen appointed by Republicans by a wide margin.”

If you want asterisks we’ll need one next to the George W Bush administration indicating he inherited the Clinton recession (dot-com bubble) and one for 9/11 indicating the terrorists entered the country and implemented their plan under the previous administration.

Both Obama and W should get one describing the sub-prime lending crises as the result of 40 years of ‘affordable housing’ policies gone wild.