Two first rate economists–Jeffrey Faux and Bradford DeLong–take a close look at the legacy of former Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s fiscal policies in this exellent piece from The American Prospect Online. A sampling of the observations:

(from Mr. Faux):
As Rubin tells the story in his new memoirs, he persuaded Clinton early on to make financial-market “confidence” the administration’s chief economic priority. Key to the strategy was Greenspan, who was supposedly concerned that spiraling federal deficits would ignite inflation, forcing him to raise interest rates and thus choke off growth. Cut the deficit, argued Rubin, and Greenspan will let the economy live.
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So Rubin’s plan worked, but the cost was high. Hopes that the peace dividend from the end of the Cold War would finance major new programs in health care, education, and other areas of public need were dashed. Social investments as a share of the country’s national income actually declined over the Clinton years. Fights over free trade split the party and contributed to the loss of the House of Representatives, from which Democrats have still not recovered. And deregulation led to an orgy of irresponsible speculation and fraud that eventually left workers without pensions, small-scale shareholders with worthless paper, and California — among other places — without the money to pay for basic services.
(from Professor DeLong):
Running surpluses now, giving the country the debt capacity to finance these forthcoming rises in social-insurance expenditures, seemed to us a wise policy. The alternative — to merely stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio and make no special provision for the generational future — seemed to us likely to create a situation in which a) the elderly programs eat the rest of the social-insurance state alive and b) they then self-destruct.
Mr. Faux closes by posing this interesting question: “Does anyone believe that more investment in health care and education would have been less productive for the American economy in the 1990s than yet more private investment in financial derivatives or shopping malls increasingly loading up consumers with imported toys and unsustainable debt? “