The wheat and the chaff

LARRY ANDERSON
Larry Anderson

My favorite presidents are Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, but there have been several good ones within my lifetime too.

These include Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, JFK, and Ronald Reagan.

The stinkers include Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter.

Notice I include Democrats and Republicans in both categories.

That is because popularity isn’t necessarily an indicator of success while a chief executive is in office. Time provides an opportunity for analysis, as does the long term effects of policies.

History can salvage or destroy.

With a very important election approaching next year, I will provide a series of columns pertaining to the various qualities of past presidents in what will hopefully be a guide at the polls.

An important resource will be the 2008 book, The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t), by political scholar Alvin S. Felzenberg.

I will try to separate the wheat from the chaff, but with support for each position.

That’s what Felzenberg does with the goal being accuracy and truth. He does this in a bipartisan way with his presidential rankings based on legislation and presidential documentation instead of reputation, personal opinion, or party affiliation.

As the series unfolds, I will describe Felzenberg’s categories for measuring a president’s success or failure.

For now, know there are six and they are inclusive of many events and much legislation.

For this column, I will discuss one of those categories and a president, Ronald Reagan, whose economic policies have been distorted by politics and by those who simply refuse to accept facts as truth.

After all, Reagan has been out of office for 27 years. It’s time for clarification.

As the 2016 campaign unfolds, I guarantee the Clinton camp will be expounding on the “failures” of Reaganomics and of so-called “trickle-down” economics. Indeed, I have heard it already.

Know first that Felzenberg puts Ronald Reagan in a tie with Teddy Roosevelt as the third best president in history. Only Lincoln and Washington are ranked higher.

Now, here are some quotes from Felzenberg’s book concerning Reagan’s approach to driving America economically.

“Ronald Reagan was the most economically successful president in the last third of the 20th century…. He reduced marginal income tax rates and expanded upon the deregulation initiative Carter began.

Reagan looked upon these measures as ways to release the creative and entrepreneurial impulses of the American people, which had been blocked from achieving their full potential by the disincentives of high taxes and excessive regulations ….

“In all, Reagan’s politics helped produce an eight-year expansion of the American economy and paved the way for an unprecedented 18 years of growth ….

“He (Reagan) majored in economics at Eureka College …. Reagan, drawing on his own experience, concluded that high taxes discouraged work and that lower taxes carried with them incentives for greater productivity ….

“In 1984, Reagan instructed Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan to prepare a comprehensive tax reform package …. The resulting Tax Reform Act of 1986 slashed the maximum individual tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent and the maximum corporate income tax rate from 46 percent to 35 percent ….”

In November, 1982, Reagan’s detractors declared “Reaganomics” a failure … “that very month the United States would embark on a peacetime boom without historical precedent. As real GDP growth surged to 7.2 percent in 1984, unemployment fell quickly from a peak of 10.8 percent in December, 1982 ,to 7.3 percent two years later, and it continued falling ….

“Reagan’s … budget deficit peaked in fiscal year 1983 at $207.8 billion … and then gradually fell to $152.6 billion in fiscal year 1989 .…

“Reagan’s policies contributed to an enormous economic boom. Real GDP grew by an average 3.6 percent a year from 1981 to 1988, and the U.S. economy produced 16 million new jobs …. All income groups shared in the overall prosperity. Reagan’s policies found many imitators throughout the world ….

“Many critics have blamed Reagan’s tax policy for the growth in the income disparity between the poor and the well-to-do during his time in office. However, recent economic research suggests that tax policy had little to do with this trend …income inequality had already begun to increase in the mid-1970s and it continued to increase under subsequent administrations that increased taxes ….

“… analysts came to realize that the most effective way to reduce disparities in income between high and low earners in a changing economy that places a premium on the acquisition of skills was through improved education and training.”

Hillary Clinton will tell us in the months ahead that Reagan’s policies were all wrong, and the answer to our gummy economy and income inequality is more taxes on the most economically successful.

That is false.

Instead of listening to her, read Felzenberg’s book, published shortly before the Age of Obama.

Then compare the above to where we are now.