A recession marked the early years of Reagan's presidency, but conditions started to improve in 1983 and the United States entered one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth since World War Ⅱ. However, an alarming percentage of this growth was based on deficit spending. In 1988, former vice president George Bush became President. He continued many of Reagan's policies. Bush's efforts to gain control over the federal budget deficit, however, were problematic. The 1990s brought a new president, Bill Clinton, a cautious, moderate Democrat, whose liberal initiatives created a myth for the American economy.
41)__________. Still, although Clinton reduced the size of the federal work force, the government continued to play a crucial role in the nation's economy. Mast of the major innovations of the New Deal, and a good many of the Great Society, remained in place. And the Federal Reserve system continued to regulate the overall pace of economic activity, with a watchful eye for any signs of renewed inflation.
42)__________. Technological developments brought a wide range of sophisticated new electronic products. Innovations in telecommunications and computer networking spawned a vast computer hardware and software industry and revolutionized the way many industries operate.
43)__________. No longer are Americans afraid that the Japanese will overwhelm them with superior technology or that they will saddle their children with government debt.
America's labor force changed markedly during the 1990s. Continuing a long term trend, the number of farmers declined. A small portion of workers had jobs in industry, while a much greater share worked in the service sector, in jobs ranging from store clerks to financial planners. If steel and shoes were no longer American manufacturing mainstays, computers and the software that make them run were.
44)__________. Economists, surprised at the combination of rapid growth and continued low inflation, debated whether the United States had a "new economy" capable of sustaining a faster growth rate than seemed possible based on the experiences of the previous 40 years.
45)__________. Asia, which had grown especially rapidly during the 1980s, joined Europe as a major supplier of finished goods and a market for American exports. Sophisticated worldwide telecommunications systems linked the world's financial markets in a way unimaginable even a few years earlier.
A. The economy, meanwhile, turned in an increasingly healthy performance as the 1990s progressed. With the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism in the late 1980s, trade opportunities expanded greatly.
B. Still, Americans ended the 1990s with a restored sense of confidence. By the end of 1999, the economy had grown continuously since March 1991, the longest peacetime economic expansion in history.
C. Clinton sounded some of the same themes as his predecessors. After unsuccessfully urging Congress to enact an ambitious proposal to expand health-insurance coverage, Clinton declared that the era of "big government" was over in America. He pushed to strengthen market forces in some sectors, working with Congress to open local telephone service to competition. He also joined Republicans to reduce welfare benefits.
D. Finally, the American economy was more closely intertwined with the global economy than it ever had been. Clinton, like his predecessors, had continued to push for elimination of trade barriers. A North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA. had further increased economic ties between the United States and its largest trading partners, Canada and Mexico.
E. While many Americans remained convinced that global economic integration benefited all nations, the growing interdependence created some dislocations as well. Workers in high-technology industries at which the United States excelled fared rather well, but competition from many foreign countries that generally had lower labor costs tended to dampen wages in traditional manufacturing industries.
F. The expansion that began in March 1991 has raised real gross domestic product by more than a third, minted 100,000 more people earning a million dollars a year. After peaking at $290,000 million in 1992, the federal budget deficit steadily shrank as economic growth increased tax revenues. In 1998, the government posted its first surplus in 30 years, although a huge debt mainly in the form of promised future Social Security payments to the baby boomers remained.
G. Best of all, the healthy economy has transformed the psyche of millions of Americans. The pervasive gloom at the beginning of the 1990s is gone.