His success or failure at this task will determine the success or failure of his presidency. Money is easy to find if long-run growth is rapid. Money will be impossible to find if the long-run productivity growth trend remains slow. And unless long-run growth accelerates Bill Clinton or his successor will face the awful political task either of telling America's elderly that the country has promised them more in medicare, social security, and pensions than it can deliver, or of telling America's taxpayers that they must finance benefits for those who are old in 2000 at levels that those who will be old in 2030 will never receive. Many things are possible if the productivity slowdown is reversed.
Few things are possible if American productivity remains stagnant.
This was appropriate in the campaign. Moreover, be careful-as of today, potential factions are not yet made up of distinct people heading bureaucracies with different views. Instead they are better thought of as different lines of thought in the heads of the same people. These arguments are strong. Those who will think they are strongest are likely to be Wall Street types, whose firms and partnerships would profit enormously from the redirection of savings from Treasury to corporate bonds.