A Google News search shows that the phrase “since the 1930s” has been used 7,454 times in the last month, and the phrase “since the Great Depression” has been used almost 6,000 times in the last month, and most of these news references are comparisons of today’s economic and financial conditions to the 1930s and the Great Depression. In contrast, the phrase “since the 1980s” has been used only 758 times in the last month.Meanwhile, as every lefty knows in his or her bleeding heart, Reaganomics was a miserable failure.
By comparing today’s economic conditions to the 1930s and the Great Depression, the news media have apparently skipped the terrible economic conditions of the early 1980s and gone all the way back 75 years to the 1930s.
[..] consider that as bad as the economic conditions were back in the early 1980s, the U.S. economy started on an economic expansion in November of 1982 that didn’t end until July 1990, 92 months later, and marked the third longest expansion in U.S. history. Given the current environment with historically low interest rates and inflation, today’s economic and financial conditions are much more favorable for economic growth than the conditions of the early 1980s. If the economy of the early 1980s recovered even when handicapped with historically high interest rates and inflation, today’s economy is much better positioned for [recovery].”
Folks like me and Mr. Perry who would cite Volcker-Reagan as an objective success that rescued us from the inflationary and statist profligacy of the LBJ-Nixon-Carter era must be looking at the wrong indicators.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that Reaganomics was a complete failure--interest rates and inflation were admittedly much worse during the late Carter years than they've been since--but I don't think that it's directly replicable today because the right since then has torn down so many of the redistributive mechanisms that existed back then--i.e. stronger unions, more progressive taxation, etc. Things have changed, and the evidence for this is in the pudding--i.e. the enormous upward redistributivism of George W. Bush's economic policies.
ReplyDeleteThat essentially the same Reaganesque policies as executed by Bush produced our current problems, as well as stagnation for most Americans over the past eight years (while most peoples' situations did improve during the Reagan years, admittedly), proves to me that we've moved too far to the right in terms of economics.