Ronald Reagan, RIP: Yes, Ronald Reagan stood fast at the helm, rearmed America and forced the Evil Empire to back down. He was at the right place, with the right foreign policy, at the right time.
Ronald Reagan, RIP
That being said,
The Ultra Moderate is not among Ronald Reagan’s devoted admirers. Other leaders, such as the late Scoop Jackson a DEMOCRAT, would have done precisely same thing to the three dottering old ideologues who drove the Soviets into bankruptcy. (Anyone remember their names? Brezhnev, Andropov, and who?)
The difference is that Ronald Reagan tried to do
the very same thing to the United States -- by massive tax cuts, spending hikes, and neglecting the nation's infrastructure of roads, bridges, and ports.
If you are old enough, think back – what was the biggest domestic issue during the Reagan Administration?
The deficit, brought on by really stupid, across-the-board, tax cuts, an arbitrary 25 percent right off the top. Reagan and his supply-siders believed that reducing taxes would actually provide more revenue because the economy would immediately shoot skyward, the so-called “supply side” effect. Yeah, sure, as if an economy -- any economy -- could grow by 25 percent in three years even if
all taxes were suspended. (Republican Senator and future presidential candidate Bob Dole called supply side “voodoo economics.”)
The result was predictable: massive deficits and an unparalleled economic, political, and diplomatic disaster. Essentially, the Reaganites paid for their folly by essentially selling the country to the Japanese, who behaved like overbearing colonialists. The U.S. only managed to salvage its national independence by sheer luck – the Japanese invested poorly, mismanaged their American businesses, and suffered a major economic meltdown.
If you don’t remember any of this, read the book by Reagan’s first budget director
David Stockman. Called “
The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed,” it is a bitter indictment the Administration’s political naiveté, rigid orthodoxy, and wishful thinking.
Like Reagan, Stockman was conservative in values and thinking, but unlike the president, he but tried to live in the
real world. Stockman, on the other hand, believed that two plus two always equaled four. Always. (Read the Amazon reviews, they are very good.)
Stockman’s reaction to the Reagan Administration’s ideological fairyland can also be found online in William Greider’s classic essay, “
The Education of David Stockman,” which appeared in
Atlantic Magazine in December, 1981, less than a year after Reagan took office. According to Greider, Stockman felt like Alice down a rabbit hole.
The deficit miscalculations should have brought down the Reagan Administration, but it only whetted its appetite for more folly: Reagan thought that all regulation of business was bad. Baaaaaaaaad. So he fired all the bank examiners and let
the savings and loan industry run wild. And when that produced a hundreds of billions in losses, he overreacted and shut down vast numbers of healthy institutions because new rules said that they were technically “insolvent.” The result was a
half trillion dollar loss.
That's what I said, you young whippersnappers. A half trillion dollar loss -- $2,000 per American -- that had to be made up by, guess who? Yep, the taxpayer. Some friend of the people!
As a writer specializing in banking and accounting, let me tell you: Not since Herbert Hoover, had an ideologue caused as much economic pain.
Still think that Ronald Reagan was a great man? He wasn't. He was just a intellectually inflexible
nice guy who, like millions of others, was right about the great crisis of the twentieth century, but was flat out wrong about everything else.
