Barb
Carpe Scrotum
"The Reagan administrations hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces the welfare state and the warfare state that drive the federal spending machine."
How was this the GOP fault again? Does Stockman read this before he published it?
David Stockman was President Reagan's OMB Head from 1981-1984, and the economist who planned Reagans economic policy. Stockman described his plan as a radical economic revolution that would cause short-term pain for some, but produce long-term benefits for all. The revolution failed because political reality got in the way, and because the men he worked with were not policy men or economists, but politicians with constituencies and project preferences of their own. Stockman is an economic and ideological purist. He seems to see numbers as being more tangible than people are, but he is intellectually consistent. He listed a host of corporate welfare giveaways, including the defense budget, with the same tone of outrage that he treated social welfare.
Stockman, David A. The Triumph of Politics; How the Reagan Revolution Failed. 1st Edition. New York, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1986, 10-14 and 392
Reagan failed the same way FDR succeeded, because Progressives say so!
Pick any 3 metrics, any 3 metrics at all, you pick it, even including the deficit from when Reagan came into office as opposed to when he left and let's talk about them
"Because I say so" carries no weight with me at all.
You Progressive have been proven liars on FDR Greatness and now let's deal with Reagan's "Failure"?
Oh, by the way, Obama Failed Stimulus DWARFS Reagan 1982 Budget. Bear that in mind when you talk about Reagan's "failures"
The Center for the Study of Policy Studies indicated that Lower social protections at a time of rising unemployment threatened to change the economic opportunity structure for an entire class of the labor force. The Center specified that this was not a temporary change, but a permanent consequence for generations of their families.
The Center further reported that the new and near poor in the early 1980s consisted of people who formerly held stable jobs and whose wages had been interrupted or that currently did not keep up with the higher cost of living. There were more people involuntarily unemployed in 1982 than any time since 1941, and the higher unemployment numbers were at least in part due to Reagans economic policies. Certain factors such as low industrial productivity and the high cost of energy and oil were problems that existed when Reagan came into office. The solutions Reagan favored to fix these problems, his tax policies, program changes, and regulation strategies concentrated economic suffering excessively upon the poor. In tandem with these actions, Reagan raised, through his tax policy, the fortunes of the wealthiest people in America.
The study found that those hardest it by the unemployment of the early 1980s were blue-collar workers, who experienced a 15.9% unemployment rate. High technological growth and cyclical recessions have and will continue to eliminate millions of jobs. Displacements by technology that created a need for higher education and training came together at a time when people were unable to access them because they were without the financial wherewithal. Chafe noted that when the Unemployment rate decreased, the jobs gained were mostly at lower wages than those they replaced were, and in the service sector rather than the skilled. This widened the gap between the rich and poor, and added more to their numbers.
The Urban Institute found that key changes in economic policy were the administrations refusal to use counter-cyclical measures to lessen economic shocks, maintain high employment, and keep prices stable. This change was a departure from governmental monetary policy in practice since 1946, policy proven over time to benefit labor, society, and business. From 1981 to 1982, wages remained static, unemployment rose 2%, median family income went down 3.5%, and poverty rose from 13.2% in 1980 to 14.0% in 1981, the highest level since 1967. Conversely, tax relief offered higher benefits for high-income families, and effectively raised taxes for lower income families. Cuts to benefit programs disproportionately and negatively affect those with lower and reduced incomes. The Tax policy raised buying power only modestly for the middle class, not at all for the poor, and the wealthy experienced the greatest increase.
Palmer and Sawhill updated The Reagan Experiment for The Urban Institute with The Reagan Record. They concluded that no matter what Reagan did, a degree of recession was unavoidable in 1981-1982, but a different set of macroeconomic policies that focused more on employment rather than inflation would have made it milder.
Schorr maintained that in Reagans first budget, those who earned less than $10k per year lost $223 billion, and those who made over $80k per year gained $35 billion. He regarded this as the most blatant redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in recent times, and a deliberate reintroduction of social insecurity.
The Center for the Study of Social Policy. On The Edge: Poverty, Work, and Reaganomics, 3-5, and 9
Chafe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, 487-489. See Also The Center for the Study of Social Policy. On The Edge: Poverty, Work, and Reaganomics, 11-12.
The Urban Institute. The Reagan Experiment, 6, 19, and 21-22.
Ibid, 21-22.
The Reagan Record, Updated Edition of: The Reagan experiment, 1982. Edited by John L. Palmer and Isabel V. Sawhill. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1984.344.
Schorr, Alvin L. Common Decency, 16-18.