Um, hogwash.
The economy was burdened by high inflation, interest and unemployment rates for more than a decade. Historically, economic growth was abysmal. Recall Nixon's ridiculous price-freeze policy? That was before Ford and the dip of 1975. The Stagflation era was the worst economy since the Great Depression, worse than the so-called great recession that Obama prolonged. Your understanding of that period and the dramatic, long-term results of Reagan's policies is abysmal too.
Gutted the middleclass?! You're outside you mind. Look, put down the crack pipe and step away from the implement.
Where did you get the 11.3% number for unemployment and why do you foolishly pretend not to understand that the peak of unemployment during the second year of Reagan's term had nothing to do with his policies? He inherited Stagflation and the rising unemployment that bleed over into his first term. He was elected to fix the economy, and he did, starting with his dramatic reduction of the staggeringly high KEYNESIAN, DEMAND-SIDE income tax rates! By the end of 1983, the more than decade-long period of the Nixon-Ford-Carter malaise was over.
All three of them were Keynesians. Both the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment were clueless.
Demand-side government spending is just one side of the Keynesian equation, and the historical record of demand-side spending with its exorbitant rates of taxation is abysmal. Demand-side economics only works at significantly high rates of across-the-board spending such as that of WWII or that of the Eisenhower interstate highway system. It was the war that got America out of the Great Depression, not anything FDR ever did before it. The isolated and sporadic infrastructure projects and especially the artificial inflation of wages and prices of the FDR Administration's command economics were destructive, unnecessarily prolonging the Depression for more than a decade.
Who in their right mind wants the government to spend like crazy as if the nation were at war all the time?
Oh, wait, that would be you leftists.
Earlier you claimed that FDR's artificial hikes in wages helped the working man. They did no such thing. Not surprisingly, unemployment remained at 17% to 20% throughout that period before the war. Those artificial hikes kept the rest jobless, and FDR's artificial hikes in prices cancelled out the artificial hikes in wages . . . and so the economy remained stagnant as demand could not afford supply. The price of my grandfather's services were not artificially inflated, so he made ends meet by way of his economic model within the larger model. He never took a handout from government either, and he despised FDR, particularly because of the latter's association with "those godless Marxists!", the Wilsonian progressives of eugenics and his interment of Japanese Americans.
My grandparents were devout Christians utterly appalled by the depravity of the Hegelian historical dialectic, and, yes, they knew what that was.
Supply-side economics always works as it did under the Harding, Coolidge, Kennedy and Reagan Administrations. Reagan could have done even better for the economy had he been able to dramatically slash spending alongside his tax cuts. As it was, he did cut domestic spending as much as the Democratically controlled Congress would allow, but he was also busy rebuilding the military neglected by Ford and Carter as he beefed up NATO's nuclear arsenal to defeat the Soviet Union. That's right. He put an end to the cowardly and defeatist Détente of Nixon-Ford-Carter. We conservatives of that time were done with propping up that paper tiger, albeit, one of great evil and suffering. We elected to defeat it instead. Who'd a thunk it? Not any of them. Not any of you leftists who whined about how Reagan was out of his mind, a cowboy destabilizing the balance of mutually assured destruction.
Wrong again!
Lefty will never forgive Reagan for defeating the Soviet Union.
The highest I've ever seen the peak of Stagflation's unemployment rate marked at is 10.2%. But make it as high as you want, for it wasn't Reagan's unemployment rate, but that of the ninnies of Keynesianism. Yeah. Sure. Jack it up all you want. That only makes the triumph of Reagan's economic policies all that more impressive, you silly man. Only idiots fail to understand that presidential terms and economic cycles do not neatly coincide, that the impact of economic reforms occur at the very moment of their passage.
"Alright, you interest, inflation and unemployment rates, the president signed it into law. Now drop to your knees and put your hands behind your backs immediately or else."
The history of the American economy is this: supply-side economics works. Keep taxes and spending low and the economy will bloom. The only kind of federal government spending that makes any sense is that for national defense and that which benefits the infrastructural needs of the economy across the board. And the history of the American economy since the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment is this: supply-side economics works and then in the face of what would ordinarily be the relatively mild and short-lived corrections of the economic cycle, America, rather than staying the course and riding them out, stupidly puts progressives in charge so the latter can artificially prolong them.
