Today let’s consider the track record of the just-deceased Jimmy Carter.
On net, he was not a good president. As you can see from this table, his statist policies outweighed his good policies (though, unlike Biden, he actually had some good policies).
Here are a few additional thoughts.
Inflation was so bad under Carter that it gets a double-weighting. It would have been triple-weighted, but Carter belatedly realized he screwed up and eventually replaced his bad Federal Reserve Chairman with a good Federal Reserve Chairman.
Creating new bureaucracies is a very bad step, though it’s important to understand that the federal government was already involved in education and energy. By creating two new departments, Carter was mostly making a symbolic mistake rather than a substantive mistake.
There’s also no mention of trade for the same reason. Carter didn’t do anything good, but he also didn’t do anything bad.
Carter’s biggest positive accomplishment was transportation deregulation. I probably should have double-weighted it.
Carter was a somewhat incoherent mess on energy regulation.
Since I mentioned that Carter’s biggest accomplishment was transportation regulation, let’s look at some excerpts from a column earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.
Authored by former Texas Senator Phil Gramm (who was a Democratic member of the House of Representatives during the Carter Administration, the column elaborates on Carter’s good work on reducing intervention.
Jimmy Carter…doesn’t get enough credit for the quarter-century economic boom from 1983 to 2008 and the underlying resilience of the economy since. Without Mr. Carter’s deregulation of airlines, trucking, railroads, energy and communications, America might not have had the ability to diversify its economy and lead the world in high-tech development… The Carter deregulation helped fuel the Reagan economic renaissance and continues to make possible the powerful innovations that remake our world. The Airlines Deregulation Act of 1978, the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 unleashed competition and spawned the invention and innovation that gave America the world’s most efficient transportation and distribution system. The cost of flying a mile declined by half and air travel became a mainstay of American life. The logistical cost of moving goods shrank as a share of gross domestic product by 50%. …analysis based on hard facts showing that government policies harm the country are repeatedly crushed in Washington by the power of vested interest. It was Mr. Carter who took on the “Iron Triangle” of established business interests, unions and government and carried the political scars he suffered in defeating them. …Mr. Carter…gets too little credit for making our country more competitive.
Finally, I can’t resist mentioned Carter’s best accomplishment. He paved the way for Ronald Reagan.
Dan Mitchell is co-founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and Chairman of the Board. He is an expert in international tax competition and supply-side tax policy.
