Liberal Forum

tharock220 » 11 Mar 2014 12:23 am » wrote: Your verbosity betrays your lack of evidence. I didn't say inflation under Reagan gets a bye. All I said was it was lower than GDP growth. Reagan's spending habits are not relevant to your OP. If you want to have that discussion we can do so, but you can't claim Carter's presidency produced a better economy than list the reasons why Carter's economy was worse. Do you not see anything wrong with that???

The Carter Presidency produced a better 'real' economy. Reagan's economy was propped up by borrowing. The trick is in taking out everything Reagan borrowed to boost the economy. Then you get to a place where apples to apples comparisons reside.

Even Reagan came to the conclusion that his initial supply side economic theories were doomed to failure. Fortunately, he recognized this fact early on and borrowed his way out of the hole he was digging the economy into. He liked the borrowing thing so well, he continued it until it eventually reaped some benefits. I have no great problem with Reagan's borrowing his way into a better economy. Consumption spending has been proven to revive economies (though only a portion of his spending was consumptive). His expansion of the EIC for instance, played a part in the recovery by boosting consumer spending. I do take great issue however, with policies he put in place that allowed for the free flow of immigrants into a labor market looking for cheap labor and which sought to move the wealth from the middle class to the upper class. We're still paying the price for those policies.

Carter was much more of a fiscal conservative than Reagan and could have pulled off even better results, had he chosen to substantially increase the debt and raid the SS fund.