Liberal Forum

Cannonpointer » 16 Feb 2014 1:37 pm » wrote:Make up your mind. In your math, you show -0.2 as the third number, using the October fiscal year as the measuring stick. But in your follow-on explanation, you use -0.2 as the hand-off year, using the election year as the measuring stick. This type of mathematical mishmash is poor presentation, son.

I will get to your presentation soon, so please: Try to refine it in the interim, make it less dishonest.

Reagan's Legacy: Our 25-Year Boom
By Investor's Business Daily....

Let's go back to 1982, in many ways the bleakest year since the Depression. The economy had emerged severely damaged by the stagflation of the 1970s. Americans' confidence, both in government and in the economy, had reached a low ebb in 1980. Many felt our best years lay behind us.

On the nations' campuses and even in some of its boardrooms, people were talking about capitalism as a failed system. ....

It was Reagan who brought America's capitalist economy roaring back to life, ending energy price controls, slashing income tax rates by 25% and dramatically reducing tax rates on capital gains.

Americans had been told for years — as they're now being told again — to expect diminished standards of living. Then they watched as the Reagan years set in place one of the most durable and remarkable booms in incomes and wealth in history.

Yet the media and academia rarely credited Reagan for his accomplishments — especially on the economy, where "Reaganomics" became a term of opprobrium among the intelligentsia.

But it's a fact. As the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research once declared, we lived in the "longest sustained period of prosperity in the 20th century" from 1982 to 1999 — one big boom, the NBER said, set off by Reagan.

Reagan's magic was simple. He wanted to lower interest rates, slash inflation, cut unemployment and boost economic growth. These things, at the time, seemed impossible. But he did it.

The so-called misery index — that is, unemployment plus inflation — hit 21% as Reagan was elected in 1980. By the time his terms were over, it had plunged to around 9%.

Interest rates likewise plunged — contrary to the predictions of many pundits, who boldly predicted that the budget deficits which emerged in the 1980s would send rates spiraling upward. From a stratospheric 21% in 1980, the prime rate fell to 7% by decade's end.

During the 1970s, many Americans for the first time saw incomes shrink. But from 1981 to 1989, median real household income rose by $4,000. The poorest Americans, who saw their incomes fall 5% in the 1970s, watched their incomes rise 6% in the 1980s.
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/article ... _boom.html