Here comes your history/economics lesson:
“Between the early 1980s and 2007 we lived in an economic Golden Age. Never before have so many people advanced so far economically in so short a period of time as they have during the last 25 years. Until the credit crisis, 70 million people a year were joining the middle class. The U.S. kicked off this long boom with the economic reforms of Ronald Reagan, particularly his enormous income tax cuts. We burst from the economic stagnation of the 1970s into a dynamic, innovative, high-tech-oriented economy. Even in recent years the much-maligned U.S. did well. Between year-end 2002 and year-end 2007 U.S. growth exceeded the entire size of China's economy.”
If sensible rescue efforts continue--and they will--the immediate crisis will quickly pass.
www.forbes.com
- Under Reagan, the debt went up $1.7 trillion, from $900 billion to $2.6 trillion.
- But….the national wealth went up $ 17 trillion
- Reagan's near-trillion-dollar bulge in defense spending transformed the global balance of power in favor of capitalism. Spurring a stock-market, energy, venture-capital, real-estate and employment boom, the Reagan tax-rate cuts and other pro-enterprise policies added some $17 trillion to America's private-sector assets, dwarfing the trillion-dollar rise in public-sector deficits and creating 45 million net new jobs at rising wages and salaries.
George Gilder: The Real Reagan Lesson for Romney-Ryan
Reaganomics - Wikipedia
And the tax cuts of the Economic Recovery Act of 1981 stimulated economic growth. “As a 1982 JEC study pointed out,[
1] similar across-the-board tax cuts had been implemented in the 1920s as the Mellon tax cuts, and in the 1960s as the Kennedy tax cuts. In both cases the reduction of high marginal tax rates actually increased tax payments by "the rich," also increasing their share of total individual income taxes paid.”
http://www.house.gov/jec/fiscal/tx-grwth/reagtxct/reagtxct.htm
“As inflation came down and as more and more of the tax cuts from the 1981 Act went into effect, the economic began a strong and sustained pattern of growth.”
http://www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes/ustax.shtml
- The benefits from Reaganomics:
- The economy grew at a 3.4% average rate…compared with 2.9% for the previous eight years, and 2.7% for the next eight.(Table B-4)
- Inflation rate dropped from 12.5% to 4.4%. (Table B-63)
- Unemployment fell to 5.5% from 7.1% (Table B-35)
- Prime interest rate fell by one-third.(Table B-73)
- The S & P 500 jumped 124% (Table B-95) http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/tables10.html
- Charitable contributions rose 57% faster than inflation. Dinesh D’Souza, “Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary May Became an Extraordinary Leader,” p. 116
