Recall the 1990s when the Clinton administration balanced the budget ahead of the schedule it had set with Congress because of faster job growth than anyone expected — bringing in more tax revenues than anyone had forecast.Arrrrrrgh!!!. I can't take these STOO-PID™ democrat morons and their "Clinton Growth" meme any longer! Every single one of these JERKS seems to be forgetting about a certain thing that happened during the 90s that created that 'growth' and tax revenue.
The Internet, Personal Computers and Software!That was it in a nutshell. THAT is where that "Clinton Growth" came from, nowhere else. And every industry and company that started using all that new fangled stuff created the Wealth and Tax Money that filled Fedzilla's coffers during said "Tech Boom" (scores of Millionaires were created overnight).
So all this 'let's return to the Clinton Tax Rates because they worked' is utter bullsh__. Unless there's some new Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Michael Dell hiding in some weeds somewhere just waiting to create a whole new industry -- and a new way of living -- a growth like we all saw when Billy-Jeff was POTUS will never happen again. Period, end.
an aside: But Billy-Jeff, being the vindictive pr**k he is, couldn't leave any of that success for Dubya to also capitalize on, hell no. So what'd he do? ... sic the DOJ on Microsoft. Then the 'Tech Boom' went 'Bust', NASDAQ crashed, and Dubya took office with the start of a recession on his hands!
Exactly right.
This little story is for anyone not familiar with the software industry.
I was working with this software during the 90’s.
www.peoplesoft.com
They had competitors: SAP, Oracle enterprise software, to a lesser extent JD Edwards.
In the 1980’s, corporate backoffice software ran on mainframes or mid-range computers.
Unix servers were starting to be thought of as an alternative in the late 80’s, but one needed to run a SQL database to store data in, since they did not have a built-in indexed, or even record-oriented file system (files are like PC files, simply a stream of bytes).
Also, PCs were becoming commonplace and had software users preferred - PC’s now had color screens and M$ operating systems were slowly getting to the point of enablingi users to run multiple programs at once. By the early 90’s, the mouse had been invented and PCs were graphical.
A new paradigm was envisioned in the late 80’s, client-server, where the presentation code of software would run on a PC and the data storage was run on a server; application logic could run on either. In mainframe and mid-range, the user was using a terminal, or PC terminal emulator software, which gave them only a login session on the big computer: every user’s entire session, presentation, application logic and data storage, was running on the big computer.
Internal IT departments and software companies were hesitent to take on the job of porting (rewriting for a new platform) their old software so it’s data would be stored in SQL databases instead of the “legacy” mainframe and mid-range file systems. It would involve risk, since the logic had to be separated into 2 or 3 layers (presentation, application, storage) thus it was not a straightforward rewrite.
In steps the entrepreneur. PeopleSoft wrote their own toolset that was client-server in the early 90’s, then wrote software applictions using their toolset. They advertised that their software used date fields with 4 digits for the year and their code was designed to work with that format, so the changeover from 1999 to 2000 would not be a problem. SAP, Oracle, JDE and other smaller firms jumped into the fray. Tons of old software used only the last 2 digits of the year (MMDDYY instead of MMDDYYYY), making it set up to fail any time it compared two dates in different centuries (it would always think dates 2000 and beyond CAME BEFORE dates prior to 2000).
All these new software applications stored their data in SQL databases.
So buying new applications fixed ALL problems. Even then, IT shops were afraid to take on the risk of all these new technologies.
The entrepreneurs mostly had a great plan for this: instead of sending out their own staff to install and configure the software applications, they would start a “gold rush” by HANDING that work to just about anyone who started a consulting firm. They realized a) they could not hire these “implementation” guys fast enough and it would restrain their ability to grow sales of their software, but more importantly - b) the outside consulting firms would be hired by companies to help them decide which company’s software to buy. They designed their software implementation process to be a big project that would take 6 months to even several years for large multi-phase projects. This represented a lot of potential consulting sales - so consultants would HELP THEM SELL as well, often steering clients to the packages most costly to implement.
By the mid-90’s, basically every company discovered that it was going to have a Y2K problem.
Basically, every company in the world was in a race against time to get their essential software replaced with these new packages - and since hitting Y2K unprepared would destroy their record-keeping and ability to do business, this was an emergency which justified just about any expense to fix.
Every company in the world was buying new software, hiring consultants, trainers (all users needed training). All the server part of software would have to run a a new server - and not just one - but typically at least three, one for development, one for testing, one for production. Large projects would buy dozens of new servers for this new software.
Not to mention - every company in the 1990s was figuring out that that they needed a website. Again, it was a new subject they knew nothing about - all this work went to consultants, and ran on -— all new server machines.
IT labor was in such short supply that wages rose so fast that it was typical that a IT employee’s earnings would double or triple in a few years as they changed jobs. People working in non-computer fields rushed into the IT job market, quickly learning a skill and getting hired in an IT job. And still the labor supply was incredibly tight for IT and IT salaries remained high.
The economy was boosted even more by all the other effects this technology boom; the networking industry (H/W and consulting) needed for the internet, IPOs, the stock market, travel & entertainment for consultants on the company dime, real estate market and every other thing consumers buy for newly high-income people, etc., etc.
It was an upward spiral that the government, the Fed and most of Wall Street did not understand and still don’t.
I remember talking with another consultant in the fall of 1999, laughing, agreeing, one needed to be “all cash” in about February 2000.
Software implementation contracts started ending in droves; it took several years for a new normal to be established that had much lower software and consulting sales.
None of this was orchestrated by Washington DC. In fact, in the slow times after 2000, software companies targeted governments and made versions of their software tailored to the government, who bought it to get in on the coolness of the new technology. Higher Ed is more fertile ground where the sell new implementations these days. (The initial implementation is the big sale, after that, the consultants and software companies don’t make as much off the client).
FANNIE and FREDDIE had big hip, cool software implementations going on while they were collapsing. Completely bogus.