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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (257835)	8/8/2014 4:38:11 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541445

Jobs mushroomed in Carters early term - but that is all part of the awful mess that led to runaway inflation. By the end of the Carter term job creation numbers were near zero. So the economy that Crater handed over to Reagan was in complete disarray. No jobs created, out of control inflation. Reagan brought it back into the realm of normalcy. I see it very differently. Carter had virtually nothing to do with the "awful mess that led to runaway inflation". That was baked into the cake by LBJ and Nixon combined with the steep rise in energy costs due to OPEC. If we didn't have inflation in the mid- to late 70s, we would have had a terrible recession. And, in fact, the only way to get out of that inflation was for Paul Volcker to rein in money supply and throw us into a terrible recession. That wasn't Carter, except insofar as he nominated Volcker and backed him, even though Volcker jeopardized his reelection chances. That was Carter's courage and decency--he backed Volcker doing what everyone knew had to be done. And it wasn't Reagan that pulled us out of that recession. It was Volcker again--lowering interest rates after he deemed inflationary expectations to be killed in our psyche--combined with rapidly falling energy prices that were a combination of Volcker's recession (lower demand) and the world getting more efficient as every adjusted to the higher energy prices of the late 70s. Reagan did two things that "helped": (1) he drastically lowered tax rates--and what that really did was dramatically increase the deficit and the debt, setting the stage for people like Cheney to say that "Reagan proved that debt doesn't matter" and also setting the stage for Dubya Disaster. (2) He set up the Greenspan Commission to fix SS--but then his admin set the precedent to count the extra dollars that SS was bringing in as part of the budget. A terrible choice. Really really terrible. But he did it because his tax cuts blew such a huge hole in the budget and his people couldn't face the truth that their beloved supply side voodoo did work as advertised. So they pretended that the SS money was a positive contribution to revenue and they raised taxes in his second term--and still didn't cover the hole that they created and pretended wasn't there. True assholes all.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (257835)	8/8/2014 4:44:54 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541445

Gonna watch out for the kitchen sink soaring toward me. Don't know why it's important to you to mischaracterize Krugman's argument as a wholistic one. It's only about job creation. Pure and simple. Krugman, like many of us, considers the Reagan years as the defining moment in the loss a hardy middle class. It was certainly caused by other factors, but, as Rick Perlstein argues in his most recent book, it was the moment in which the political structures lost the opportunity to hold the poison at bay. Reagan just added to it. However, Krugman, in this particular piece, just argues, on the basis of data you have yet to try to refute, that Reagan had weaker aggregate job creation numbers than Carter. Ouch!! As for the argument about his early bad years being the consequence of Carter's work, then it would only make sense to adjust Obama's for the Bush effect.