Tag Archives : Reagan
One Year Later, Another Look at Obamanomics vs. Reaganomics
On this day last year, I posted two charts that I developed using the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s interactive website. Those two charts showed that the current recovery was very weak compared to the boom of the early 1980s. But perhaps that was an unfair comparison. Maybe the Reagan recovery started strong and then hit […]
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Alan Blinder’s Accidental Case for the Flat Tax
Alan Blinder has a distinguished resume. He’s a professor at Princeton and he served as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve. So I was interested to see he authored an attack on the flat tax – and I was happy after I read his column. Why? Well, because his arguments are rather weak. So anemic […]
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A Lesson on the Laffer Curve for Barack Obama
One of my frustrating missions in life is to educate policy makers on the Laffer Curve. This means teaching folks on the left that tax policy affects incentives to earn and report taxable income. As such, I try to explain, this means it is wrong to assume a simplistic linear relationship between tax rates and […]
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No Contest When Comparing Reaganomics and Obamanomics
Both President Reagan and President Obama had to deal with serious economic dislocation upon taking office. But they used radically different approaches to deal with the problems they inherited. Reagan sought to reduce the burden of government, whereas Obama viewed government as an engine of growth. So who had the right approach? This image, taken […]
read more...Bush Was Not a Conservative
There’s an interesting debate in the blogosphere about whether President George W. Bush was a conservative (here’s a good summary of the discussion, along with lots of links, though I especially like this analysis since it cites my work.). I’ve already explained that Bush was a statist rather than a conservative, and you can find […]
read more...Spending Restraint Works: Examples from Around the World
America faces a fiscal crisis. The burden of federal spending has doubled during the Bush-Obama years, a $2 trillion increase in just 10 years. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Because of demographic changes and poorly designed entitlement programs, the federal budget is going to consume larger and larger shares of America’s […]
read more...Compared to the Reagan Era, the Bush-Obama Years Have Been a Fiscal Nightmare
Since February is the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth and I still haven’t gotten over my man-crush on the Gipper, I figured it would be interesting to look at Reagan’s fiscal record, particularly to see whether he was successful in restraining the growth of domestic spending. There is lots of good information in the […]
read more...To Fix the Budget, Bring Back Reagan…or Even Clinton
President Obama unveiled his fiscal year 2012 budget today, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that there’s no major initiative such as the so-called stimulus scheme or the government-run healthcare proposal. The bad news, though, is that government is far too big and Obama’s budget does nothing to address this […]
read more...Comparing Reaganomics and Obamanomics with Minneapolis Fed Data
Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old on February 6, so let’s celebrate his life by comparing the success of his pro-market policies with the failure of Barack Obama’s policies (which are basically a continuation of George W. Bush’s policies, so this is not a partisan jab). The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has […]
read more...Obamanomics vs. Reaganomics
Previous posts on this blog have featured charts showing that Obama’s policies are not working (see here and here). I even showed a cartoon making the same point. And I cited a column with data comparing Reagan and Obama. The Heritage Foundation has a very powerful addition to this genre, a chart comparing job performance […]
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