On December 21, 2000, shortly before leaving office, President Bill Clinton signed the New Markets Tax Credit Program into law, as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2001. He called it “the most significant effort ever to help hard-pressed communities lift themselves up through private investment and entrepreneurship.” Legacy-defining stuff, in other words. Or, as a new book argues, “a fitting capstone to Clinton’s relentless overselling of what small market–based antipoverty programs could do.”
To build support for the program’s passage, Clinton had gone on a nation-spanning “New Markets” tour of poor places, both urban and rural. Clinton visited Appalachia, South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, Chicago, East Palo Alto, rural North Carolina, and more. For stretches of these tours, he was accompanied by the civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, who twice vied for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s with his “Rainbow Coalition” of the urban and rural poor and working class.
