No Dave, I will not protest that "Reagan pulled us out of the recession through massive deficit spending on the military". He did indeed spend like a drunken sailor on stupid military weapons appropriations that didn't work, but that had nothing to do with ending the recession.

The guy who ended the recession was Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987. Appointed and fully supported by Jimmy Carter, he stopped the runaway inflation and massive interest rates that was seriously hampering the engine of capital formation that forms the basis of the American economy.

Unfortunately, it took a few years of tight financial discipline for his program to start working. So Carter took the blame for imposing the much needed economic medicine; Reagan took the credit.

Then, because Reagan really didn't believe in balancing budgets, he started Republicans down a new path - massive deficit spending. Again, it took nearly five or six years for that particular idiocy to come home to roost. Ironically, it happened right in the middle of George H.W. Bush's term, so the Republican President who'd denounced "voodoo economics" lost his office largely because he was right.

Now George H.W. Bush was good for the economy, and Clinton benefited from it. Clinton was good for it too. So good, he was bringing down America's structural deficits, with corresponding efficiencies. Even though investors ignored Volcker-heir Greenspan's warnings about "irrational exuberance" in the tech stocks, the U.S. was well positioned to continue its growth under the smaller-but-effective-goverment policies of moderate Democrats, including the so called "pay as you go" system of financial discipline.

Then came the Idiot in Chief.

The only "good news" from Kerry's loss in 2004 is that Bush is beginning to reap what he has sewn. Unfortunately, the full effects of all his "off budget" spending on Republican military-industrial porkbarrel won't be felt until he's out of office. The price is likely to be huge. Perhaps even worse than the stagflation that Carter inherited from the Vietnam War.

And people like you will go on believing that running up a massive balance on the nation's credit card is a much better long term policy than doing the hard, sobering, job of paying it off.

Posted by: Steven Maurer | Oct 31, 2006 10:40:40 AM

Sssssssh. You will upset their delicately fantasyland talking-point world where everything evil is liberal and Democratic, where Clinton didn't over the longest and largest economic expansion in our nation's history, by introducing facts and reality into the mix. I mean, it will really hurt their feelings if you point out that it took the tax increases of Geo. H.W. Bush, then Clinton (without a single GOP vote in Congress I might add) to finally correct the insane polices of Reagan's first term to come to fruition, coupled with shrinking the Federal Gov. to the smallest size since the Johnson administration (which was before there was even a Dept. of Education, or Energy) all under Clinton and Gore with their re-inventing Gov. initiatives. Let the continue to slumber in their comforting fantasies that the GOP have clue one about how to actually govern effectively and to push sound fiscal policy when in reality is the exact opposite. After all, they know what is the real enemy... gay people having the same rights under the law as everyone else or women having legal control over their own bodies.

Posted by: Dave Lister | Oct 31, 2006 11:10:26 AM "And people like you will go on believing that running up a massive balance on the nation's credit card is a much better long term policy than doing the hard, sobering, job of paying it off." Actually, I don't believe that at all. I think W is a calamity for the Republican party and the nation and I was a Clinton supporter because of the great job he did on the economy and the deficit.

<h2>So why do you buy into the myth that Reaganomics was anything more than an unmitigated disaster and the the Laffer curve is now a thrice proven crock of shit?</h2>