It seems Jeffrey Epstein’s tentacles reached much further than any of us could have imagined, with Larry Summers, one of the nation’s most prominent economists, being caught in the web. I have nothing to add to the specifics of his involvement with Epstein. It would have been better if his removal from public life had been caused by his more than three decades of wrongheaded policy advice. 

Larry Summers has been at the center of economic policy debates since the early 1990s, when he took a top position in the Clinton Treasury Department after a brief stint as the chief economist at the World Bank. There, he was one of the architects of Clinton’s economic policy, from which we are still seeing the fallout today.

Clinton did have some progressive wins, such as expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and raising taxes on the rich. And of course, the general economic indicators, especially during his second term, were impressive: Median household income shot up, as did median wages. And for deficit hawks, we got the first budget surpluses in three decades. But he was also responsible for trade policy that ultimately cost millions of manufacturing jobs, financial deregulation, and a boneheaded effort to cut Social Security that fortunately never got liftoff.

On trade, Clinton first pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, over the objection of the vast majority of Democrats in Congress. In his last year in office, he got Congress to admit China to the World Trade Organization, again over the objection of the vast majority of Democratic members of Congress.

China’s admission to the WTO, along with the high dollar policy pushed by the Clinton Treasury Department, led to a massive loss of manufacturing jobs over the next decade. In the 10 years from December 1999 to December 2009, we lost 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, more than one-third of the country’s total. These job losses devasted whole communities, where one or two factories were the major employers. Many have not recovered even today.

It’s also important to point out this massive job loss........

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