I think you have placed the cart squarely in front of the horses in your analysis of the Clinton years. The taxes in the Clinton plan went into effect quickly, yet according to your graph the investment capital spike didn’t start until late ’99. In fact the Heritage Foundation claims that it was tax cuts in ’96 that sparked the boom. I think they are wrong too. Tax policy operates at the margins of our economy, what really drives it of course is business. You mention the dot com boom but not the new industry that sparked it. The 90’s was the time for putting multiple computers in every home and office across much of the globe, and of course the U.S. had the corner on that market. I suspect that some of the investment spike starting in ’99 was related to the “Y2K” problem and the seemingly desperate need to fix the billions of lines of code set to fail when computer clocks rolled over to 00.

The IT revolution of the 90’s sparked huge gains in productivity, the global capital market, “just in time” supply chains, and massive new pools of capital that needed investing somewhere. We are still dealing with those giant pools of money, which slosh around in “investment” markets causing one asset bubble after another. We are still dealing with the capital concentration made possible by instantaneous capital movement, by reductions to labor costs made possible by automation and resulting growth of bottom lines for wealth holders, by “supply side” tax policy which never went away. The Green New Deal may be the kind of juice for the economy that was the IT revolution. Our economy is nowhere near functioning “at capacity”. We have corporate trillions on the sideline not willing to chase production investment in a production stock that can easily meet demand. We have essentially flat wages and the increase of low paying jobs that continue to weigh down demand. It’s possible that the large investments in an energy paradigm shift could draw this capital out of essentially non-productive “investments” in asset ownership and back to Main St. to pay Americans first to rebuild our energy and usage infrastructure into a green model, and then of course the globe’s.