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Leadership: A mainstream media guru says the president is channeling Ronald Reagan but risks becoming Jimmy Carter. Reagan's policies worked, Carter's didn't and Obama's haven't. Wake up and smell the tax cuts.
Noted journalist Howard Fineman, a former Newsweek icon now plying his thoughts at the Huffington Post, is not happy with President Obama's embrace of fiscal and political reality by striking a deal with a resurgent GOP that extends the Bush tax cuts.
Typical of mainstream media angst, Fineman opines that Obama has "just been backed — or backed himself — into a Reaganite corner" and embraced the "essence of the Reagan years, (which) was stimulative tax cuts that would grow the economy, yes, but leave a legacy of debt that would ultimately require program-starving governmental austerity."
We haven't noticed any starving-governmental austerity for quite some time, and it's about time for some. As always, we are in fiscal trouble not because we tax too little but because we spend too much. Reagan stimulated the economy. Up to now, the Obama recovery has failed because all it stimulated was the government.
Fineman forgets the economic disaster Reagan inherited from Jimmy Carter. Inflation raged at 12.5% when he took office and was 4.4% when he left. Poverty and unemployment were rising, incomes were falling, productivity was stagnant, economic growth had ceased and the stock market was on the verge of collapse.
Reagan not only reversed the malaise of Jimmy Carter but fueled an economic boom that lasted 92 months without recession. Unemployment sank from 7.1% to 5.5% and the prime interest rate fell from 15.3% to 9.3% as we enjoyed a then-record boom.
During this boom, the economy grew by a third and tax receipts doubled, as we added the equivalent of the West German economy to our own. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment of the Reagan era was the creation of 20 million new jobs, 82% of which, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, were high-skilled, high-paying positions — technical, managerial, professional and the like.
It was Reagan's lowering of the tax rates and the cutting of capital gains taxes that unleashed America's entrepreneurs and innovators who sparked the high-tech revolution and dot-com boom that helped President Clinton, working with a Republican Congress, to produce actual budget surpluses.
So if President Obama is really starting to channel Ronald Reagan, we wish him well and Godspeed.
He has a ways to go, however. For example, Reagan took on the unions by firing the air traffic controllers. He didn't buy a car company for them with taxpayer money.
Stimulus: Furious with President Obama for making a deal with Republicans, Democrats have hit on a new reason for supporting economy-killing tax hikes: the deficit. This would be funny if it weren't so tragic. 'Tax Cut Plan Digs Deeper Deficit Hole," roared a front-page Los Angeles Times ...
Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 — and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed ...
Reform: When we said nearly half of U.S. doctors might close their practices or retire early rather than live under the Democrats' health overhaul, we were heavily criticized. The critics, though, were wrong. Four in nine doctors responding to an IBD/TIPP poll sent out in August 2009 said ...
For once, top Obama economic advisor Larry Summers got it right. Warning opponents of the big tax-cut deal, Summers told reporters, "Failure to pass this bill in the next couple weeks would materially increase the risk that the economy would stall out and we would have a double-dip recession." Too ...
Cyberwar: If there was ever any doubt WikiLeaks is a criminal enterprise, it has vanished now that hackers have attacked MasterCard, Visa and Amazon.com. This is the work of organized crime, not spontaneous dissent. For years, WikiLeaks has claimed that its release of stolen U.S. classified ...
Posted By: catalite(25) on 12/9/2010 | 11:15 PM ET
I wouldn't call the Huffington post mainstream media.
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