Ronald Reagan would have been 103 years old today, and it shows how far we’ve fallen from the high standard his leadership represented that, today, the Congressional Budget Office projects slower-than-average growth may be the “new normal” for America.
President Reagan would never have accepted such a fate for this nation. And before defenders of President Obama try to blame Bush and say there’s nothing Obama could have done because he faced such a difficult economy coming into office, they should know that Reagan faced a flaming recession of his own when he took office.
What Reagan inherited from Jimmy Carter as abysmal. Unemployment was soaring at 10.8 percent. Inflation was over 13 percent. The prime interest rate was an astonishing 25 percent!
Reagan could have done what Obama has done, which is to blame his predecessor and tell everyone to prepare for a “new normal” of slow growth and economic stagnation. He could have insisted to everyone that the challenge was too hard and that he couldn’t be expected to make it better.
But here is the difference between Reagan and Obama: When Reagan ran for president, it was because he understood that challenges were difficult but needed to be successfully tackled. The well-being of the nation depended on it. When someone runs for president, and then whines like Obama does about how hard the job is, the appropriate response is, “Then why did you run for it?”
Reagan knew the job was hard. He ran for it because he believed he was the man to do it.
And Reagan had a plan. In 1981, he cut taxes, including a cut in the top marginal rate from 70 percent (!) to 28 percent. Oh, by the way, the opposition party controlled the House. Sound familiar? Reagan successfully persuaded enough Democrats to support his tax cuts that he was able to get them passed into law. He did not use the divided Congress as an excuse.
He also cut federal spending by $31 billion in his first year, which flew in the face of Keynesian arguments that more spending was needed to boost the economy. Reagan understood the federal government was too big and it was draining capital from the private sector. He began the reversal of that trend.
Reagan also slashed regulations that were saddling the private sector with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of additional costs.
It worked. The recession got pretty bad in 1982, but in 1983 it was roaring back. The American people understood that Reagan’s policies had made the difference – so much so that when he ran for re-election in 1984 he won an astonishing 49 states!
Obama’s policy direction has been exactly the opposite of Reagan’s. He has raised taxes, increased regulation and grown government control over the economy. He has overseen an enormous increase in federal spending, and run up the national debt to more than $17 trillion. The same Democrats who were howling about $200 billion deficits when Reagan was in office have undertaken a spending spree so breathtaking that we’ve had deficits north of $1 trillion for all but one year of Obama’s presidency.
And how well has all this worked? It has been such a complete and utter failure that the CBO is now imploring us to just accept it as the new normal.
That’s not how America was built. We are not built on normalcy. We were built on exceptionalism.
This economy is not stuck in the mud because the recession was too hard for Obama to fix. We are stuck in the mud because Obama’s policies are wrong, and he will not for one second consider the correct policies that worked in the 1980s – because he is ideologically incapable of doing so.
Happy birthday, President Reagan. We miss you. Boy, do we miss you.
