President Trump will be faced with a decision: let a painful economic contraction perform its therapy on the economy, or use the same sorts of gimmicks President Obama did to try to kick the can down the road. From William Anderson at mises.org:
Nearly four decades ago, political pundits were shocked as voters turned away President Jimmy Carter and voted in Ronald Reagan, who promised to bring fundamental change to Washington and the indwelling political establishment. At the time, unemployment was rising quickly and inflation raged in double-digits, and Reagan had promised to deal with the economic failures by cutting income tax rates, slashing government spending, and reducing the regulatory burden.
As we know, Reagan succeeded in convincing Congress to do one of those three things — cut income tax rates — but the spending and regulatory monster continued to grow. The Carter administration already had initiated most of the major deregulation initiatives, and Reagan’s role in that area was minor at best. Reagan had to deal with something else in 1982 that threatened to turn his presidency into a one-term failure: a major recession in which the nation’s unemployment rate rose to above 10 percent and the disappearance of whole swaths of the nation’s industrial sector, resulting in what has been called the “Rust Belt” of the northern United States.
Ending 1970s-Style Inflation
We know the rest of the story. The economy recovered (despite interest rates that were above 10 percent) and Reagan won re-election in 1984 in a huge electoral landslide. We also know that while the Reagan administration had many failures, capital investment nonetheless turned toward the “high-technology” sectors and telecommunications.
To continue reading: After Obama, a New Dawn or More of the Same?
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 