Open Thread: Reagan 278,000; Obama Zero
Deroy Murdock has an excellent column at National Review Online holding up the Reagan economic record vs. Barack Obama's. It's an excellent read. An excerpt follows the page break. Leave us your thoughts in the comments section: President Zero. The brand-new nickname for Barack ObamAA+ symbolizes America’s total net jobs created in August: Zippo. So, how many jobs emerged in August 1983, the analogous point in Ronald Reagan’s presidency? 278,000. Proportional to today’s population, that equals 365,000 new hires last month . Citizens pondering Obama’s latest jobs speech and how to get America working again should focus on today’s great Keynesian experiment. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side mixture of tax cuts, deregulation, and sound money competes directly against Obama’s big-government blend of Keynesian stimuli, rampant red tape, and promiscuous printing of money — as if dollars were wallpaper. The late Reagan trounces the leisurely Obama. Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 slashed the top federal income-tax from 70 percent to 50, and sliced business levies. Today, it would cost $1.86 trillion. (For consistency, I converted all of the historical numbers in this article for 1981, 1983, and 2009 into 2011 dollars. Nominal figures appear in an analysis available here .) Meanwhile, Obama’s “ stimulus ,” formally called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, cost $829 billion. Reagan deregulated America’s economy, as demonstrated by the relatively low 30,522 pages of rules added to the Federal Register in 1981 and 1982. Reagan continued President Carter’s loosening of restrictions on airlines, trucking , and other industries. The 45,696 pages that swelled the Register in 2009 and 2010 reflect Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, EPA guidelines, pro-union favors, and other regulations — atop Sarbanes-Oxley, farm programs , lighting standards, and other hurdles that Bush-Rove erected. Confirming Reagan’s commitment to reliable currency and monetary restraint, gold ’s price fell 33 percent — from $1,396.79 per ounce during Reagan’s Jan. 20, 1981, inauguration to $937.37 on Sept. 7, 1983. By converting the Bureau of Engraving and Printing into a veritable currency copy shop, Obama helped gold climb 201.4 percent through Wednesday, from $898.53 to $1,810.00. Reagan accelerated Carter’s deregulation of oil prices and encouraged domestic production, as underscored by gasoline’s 6.75 percent fall from $3.11 per gallon on inauguration day to $2.90 in late August 1983. Obama’s domestic drilling limits and anti-carbon fetish helped gasoline climb 87 percent — from $1.93 when he arrived to $3.60 on August 29. The economic and political consequences of these conflicting visions are stunning.
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Open Thread: Reagan 278,000; Obama Zero
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on September 14, 2011. Filed under