Is Obama the Next Hoover or the Next FDR?

Jonah Goldberg writes in National Review that President Obama is beginning to look like the next Herbert Hoover. This is rather ironic since the left wanted him to become the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ushering in a new era of politically-popular statism.

...the Great Depression discredited laissez-faire economics for a generation or more. Hoover, who was hardly the "market fundamentalist" FDR made him out to be, suffered largely from the (bad) luck of the draw, giving Democrats a chance to argue for a new deal of the cards. For reasons fair and unfair, Obama, who inherited a bad recession and made it worse, every day looks more like a modern-day Hoover, whining about his problems, rather than an FDR cheerily getting things done. Inadequate to the task, Obama is discrediting the statism he was elected to restore.

Jonah makes a compelling case, particularly from a political perspective. But if we look just at economic policy, the Obama-as-FDR analogy is more accurate. Hoover was a big-government interventionist with failed policies. That's a pretty good description of Bush. FDR got elected in 1932 by promising to fix the mess, which is akin to Obama's hope and change message in 2008. And, just like FDR, Obama then continued the big-government interventionist policies of his predecessor. The only difference is that Roosevelt somehow was able to remain popular even though his policies kept the nation mired in depression for another decade. Obama, by contrast, is veering dangerously close to becoming another Jimmy Carter. Tom Sowell has some key details about the timing and impact of the Hoover-Roosevelt policies.

The history of the United States is full of evidence on the negative effects of government intervention. For the first 150 years of this country's existence, the federal government did not think it was its business to intervene when the economy turned down. All of those downturns ended faster than the first downturn where the federal government intervened big time-- the Great Depression of the 1930s. ...if you look at the facts, they go like this: Unemployment never hit double digits in any of the 12 months following the big stock market crash of 1929 that is often blamed for the massive unemployment of the 1930s. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the October 1929 crash, and then began drifting downward. Unemployment was down to 6.3 percent by June 1930, when the first big federal intervention occurred. Within six months, the downward trend in unemployment reversed and hit double digits for the first time in December 1930. What were politicians to do? Say "We messed up"? Or keep trying one huge intervention after another? The record shows what they did: President Hoover's interventions were followed by President Roosevelt's bigger interventions-- and unemployment remained in double digits in every month for the entire remainder of the decade. There is another set of facts: The record that was set in 1929 for the biggest stock market decline in one day was broken in 1987. But Ronald Reagan did nothing-- and the media clobbered him for it. Then the economy rebounded and there were 20 years of sustained economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment. Can you imagine Barack Obama doing another Ronald Reagan?

Reaganomics, Obamanomics, and Carternomics

National Review captures a key difference between Reagan and Obama, writing that Reagan was willing to incur short-run political pain to make America healthier and stronger. Obama, by contrast, has pursued the free-lunch Keynesian approach. Only time will tell whether Obama becomes another Jimmy Carter, but he certainly isn't doing himself any favors by continuously pushing to expand the burden of government.

Both men faced seemingly intractable economic problems with no easy solution, but Reagan understood that curing the nation’s debilitating inflation was going to involve a good deal of short-term economic pain and political unpopularity, and he was prepared to endure that. By contrast, Obama has done everything in his power to avoid painful corrections — at great cost to future taxpayers. It is increasingly evident that his policies have merely put off these corrections or dragged them out, and that we have not avoided them at all. Reagan’s willingness to accept painful and unpopular but necessary economic adjustments — and Obama’s lack of the same fortitude — is the essence of what separates the two men. ...The blowback that resulted from Volcker’s decision to put the economy into a coma was swift and severe. The sharp recession that ensued once Volcker started shrinking the money supply prompted Democrats and Republicans alike to introduce legislation to rein in the Fed. But Reagan refused to back any such action or even criticize Volcker in public. In private, Reagan was candid about what needed to be done, according to the late Bob Novak’s reporting on the subject: “I’m afraid this country is just going to have to suffer two, three years of hard times to pay for the [inflationary] binge we’ve been on,” Reagan said. It is impossible to imagine Obama speaking such unpopular truths in public or in private after having so often expressed the opinion that a massive debt-fueled government-spending program would create millions of jobs and reconstruct an economy torn asunder by years of binging on debt. ...his unpopular moves laid the groundwork for three decades of unprecedented economic expansion. So far, we have seen no evidence that Obama’s unpopular policies will pay those kinds of dividends. Like Reagan, Obama inherited an economy with structural problems requiring painful adjustments. Unlike Reagan, he has tried to put off those adjustments or cover them up with feel-good stimulus programs. Reaganomics worked. Obamanomics? Let’s just say it will be interesting to see how much longer those trend lines overlap.

A Cheap Shot on Obama, but Still Funny

This dropped in my inbox, along with some sarcastic commentary about politicians who talk trash about knowing "whose ass to kick." If you think it's funny, you'll enjoy this gem from the archives.

Reagan vs the Statist Clowns

Here's a very nice video mixing powerful statements by Ronald Reagan with the incoherent ramblings of the buffoons now in charge of Washington.

When Keynesians Attack, Part II

I'm still dealing with the statist echo chamber, having been hit with two additional attacks for the supposed sin of endorsing Reaganomics over Obamanomics (my responses to the other attacks can be found here and here). Some guy at the Atlantic Monthly named Steve Benen issued an critique focusing on the timing of the recession and recovery in Reagan's first term. He reproduces a Krugman chart (see below) and also adds his own commentary.

Reagan's first big tax cut was signed in August 1981. Over the next year or so, unemployment went from just over 7% to just under 11%. In September 1982, Reagan raised taxes, and unemployment fell soon after. We're all aware, of course, of the correlation/causation dynamic, but as Krugman noted in January, "[U]nemployment, which had been stable until Reagan cut taxes, soared during the 15 months that followed the tax cut; it didn't start falling until Reagan backtracked and raised taxes."

This argument is absurd since the recession in the early 1980s was largely the inevitable result of the Federal Reserve's misguided monetary policy. And I would be stunned if this view wasn't shared by 90 percent-plus of economists. So it is rather silly to say the recession was caused by tax cuts and the recovery was triggered by tax increases.

But even if we magically assume monetary policy was perfect, Benen's argument is wrong. I don't want to repeat myself, so I'll just call attention to my previous blog post which explained that it is critically important to look at when tax cuts (and increases) are implemented, not when they are enacted. The data is hardly exact, because I haven't seen good research on the annual impact of bracket creep, but there was not much net tax relief during Reagan's first couple of years because the tax cuts were phased in over several years and other taxes were going up. So the recession actually began when taxes were flat (or perhaps even rising) and the recovery began when the economy was receiving a net tax cut. That being said, I'm not arguing that the Reagan tax cuts ended the recession. They probably helped, to be sure, but we should do good tax policy to improve long-run growth, not because of some misguided effort to fine-tune short-run growth.


The second attack comes from some blog called Econospeak, where my newest fan wrote:

I’m scratching my head here as I thought the standard pseudo-supply-side line was that the deficit exploded in the 1980’s because government spending exploded. OK, the truth is that the ratio of Federal spending to GDP neither increased nor decreased during this period. Real tax revenues per capita fell which is why the deficit rose but this notion that the burden of government fell is not factually based.

Those are some interesting points, and I might respond to them if I wanted to open a new conversation, but they're not germane to what I said. In my original post (the one he was attacking), I commented on the "burden of government" rather than the "burden of government spending." I'm a fiscal policy economist, so I'm tempted to claim that the sun rises and sets based on what's happening to taxes and spending, but such factors are just two of the many policies that influence economic performance. And with regard to my assertion that Reagan reduced the "burden of government," I'll defer to the rankings put together for the Economic Freedom of the World Index. The score for the United States improved from 8.03 to 8.38 between 1980 and 1990 (my guess is that it peaked in 1988, but they only have data for every five years). The folks on the left may be unhappy about it, but it is completely accurate to say Reagan reduced the burden of government. And while we don't yet have data for the Obama years, there's a 99 percent likelihood that America's score will decline.

This is not a partisan argument, by the way. The Economic Freedom of the World chart shows that America's score improved during the Clinton years, particularly his second term. And the data also shows that the U.S. score dropped during the Bush years. This is why I wrote a column back in 2007 advocating Clintonomics over Bushonomics. Partisan affiliation is not what matters. If we want more prosperity, the key is shrinking the burden of government.

When Keynesians Attack

If I was organized enough to send Christmas cards, I would take Richard Rahn off my list. I do one blog post to call attention to his Washington Times column and it seems like everybody in the world wants to jump down my throat. I already dismissed Paul Krugman's rant and responded to Ezra Klein's reasonable attack. Now it's time to address Derek Thompson's critique on the Atlantic's site.

At the risk of re-stating someone else's argument, Thompson's central theme seems to be that there are many factors that determine economic perfformance and that it is unwise to make bold pronouncements about policy A causing result B. If that's what Thompson is saying, I very much agree (and if it's not what he's trying to say, then I apologize, though I still agree with the sentiment). That's why I referred to Reagan decreasing the burden of government and Obama increasing the burden of government. I wanted to capture all the policy changes that were taking place, including taxation, spending, monetary policy, regulation, etc.Yes, the flagship policies (tax reduction for Reagan and so-called stimulus for Obama) were important, but other factors obviously are part of the equation.

The biggest caveat, however, is that one should always be reluctant to make sweeping claims about what caused the economy to do X or Y in a given year. Economists are terrible forecasters, but we're not even very proficient when it comes to hindsight analysis abourt short-run economic fluctuations. Indeed, the one part of my original post that causes me a bit of guilt is that I took the lazy route and inserted an image of the chart from Richard's column. Excerpting some of his analysis would have been a better approach, particularly since I much prefer to focus on the impact of policies on long-run growth and competitiveness (which is what I did in my New York Post column from earlier this week and also why I'm reluctant to embrace Art Laffer's warning of major economic problems in 2011).

But a blog post is no fun if you just indicate where you and a critic have common ground, so let me know identify four things about Thompson's post that rubbed me the wrong way.

1. To reinforce his warning about making excessive claims about different recessions/recoveries, Thompson pointed out that someone could claim that Reagan's recovery was associated with the 1982 TEFRA tax hike. I've actually run across people that think this is a legitimate argument, so it's worth taking a moment to explain why it isn't true. When analyzing the impact of tax policy changes, it's important to look at when tax changes were implemented, not when they were enacted (data on annual tax rates can be found here). Reagan's Economic Recovery Tax Act was enacted in 1981, but the lower tax rates weren't fully implemented until 1984. This makes it a bit of a challenge to pinpoint when the economy actually received a net tax cut. The tax burden may actually have increased in 1981 since the parts of the Reagan tax cuts that took effect that year were offset by the impact of bracket creep (the tax code was not indexed to protect against inflation until the mid-1980s). There was a bigger tax rate reduction in 1982, but there was still bracket creep, as well as previously-legislated payroll tax increases (enacted during the Carter years). TEFRA also was enacted in 1982, which largely focused on undoing some of the business tax relief in Reagan's 1981 plan. People have argued whether the repeal of promised tax relief is the same as a tax increase, but that's not terribly important for this analysis. What does matter is that the tax burden did not fall much (if at all) in Reagan's first year and might not have changed too much in 1982. In 1983, by contrast, it's fairly safe to say the next stage of tax rate reductions was substantially larger than any concomitant tax increases. That doesn't mean, of course, that one should attribute all changes in growth to what's happening to the tax code. But it does suggest that it is a bit misleading to talk about tax cuts in 1981 and tax increases in 1983. One final point. The main insight of supply-side economics is that changes in the overall tax burden are not as important as changes in the tax structure. As such, it's also important to look at which taxes were going up and which ones were decreasing. This is why Reagan's 1981 tax plan compares so favorably with Bush's 2001 tax plan (which was filled with tax credits and other policies that had little of no impact on incentives for productive behavior).

2. In addition to wondering whether one could argue that higher taxes triggered the Reagan boom, Thompson also speculates whether it might be possible to blame the tax cuts in Obama's stimulus for the economy's subsequent sub-par performance. There are two problems with that hypothesis. First, a substantial share of the tax cuts in the so-called stimulus were actually new spending being laundered through the tax code (see footnote 3 of this Joint Committee on Taxation publication). To the extent that the provisions represented real tax relief, they were much more akin to Bush's non-supply side 2001 tax cuts and a far cry from the marginal tax-rate reductions enacted in 1981 and 2003. And since even big tax cuts have little or no impact on the economy if incentives to engage in productive behavior are unaffected, there is no reason to blame (or credit) Obama's tax provisions for anything.

3. Why doesn't anyone care that the Federal Reserve almost always is responsible for serious recessions? This isn't a critique of Thompson's post since he doesn't address monetary policy from this angle, but if we go down the list of serious economic hiccups in recent history (1974-75, 1980-82, and 2008-09), bad monetary policy inevitably is a major cause. In short, the Fed periodically engages in easy-money policy. This causes malinvestment and/or inflation, and a recession seems to be an unavoidable consequence. Yet the Fed seems to dodge any serious blame. At some point, one hopes that policy makers (especially Fed Governors) will learn that easy money policies such as artificially low interest rates are not a smart approach.

4. Thompson writes, "Is Mitchell really saying that $140 billion on Medicaid, firefighters, teachers, and infrastructure projects are costing the economy five percentage points of economic growth?" No, I'm not saying that and didn't say that, but I have been saying for quite some time that taking money out of the economy's left pocket and putting it in the economy's right pockets doesn't magically increase prosperity. And to the extent money is borrowed from private capital markets and diverted to inefficient and counter-productive programs, the net impact on the economy is negative. Thompson also writes that, "Our unemployment picture is a little more complicated than 'Oh my god, Obama is killing jobs by taking over the states' Medicaid burden!'" Since I'm not aware of anybody who's made that argument, I'm not sure how to respond. That being said, jobs will be killed by having Washington take over state Medicaid budgets. Such a move would lead to a net increase in the burden of government spending, and that additional spending would divert resources from the productive sector of the economy.

The moral of the story, though, is to let Richard Rahn publicize his own work.

Responding to Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein

I seem to have touched a raw nerve with my post earlier today comparing Reagan and Obama on how well the economy performed coming out of recession. Both Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman have denounced my analysis (actually, they denounced me approving of Richard Rahn's analysis, but that's a trivial detail). Krugman responded by asserting that Reaganomics was irrelevant (I'm not kidding) to what happened in the 1980s. Klein's response was more substantive, so let's focus on his argument. He begins by stating that the recent recession and the downturn of the early 1980s were different creatures. My argument was about how strongly the economy rebounded, however, not the length, severity, causes, and characteristics of each recession. But Klein then cites Rogoff and Reinhardt to argue that recoveries from financial crises tend to be less impressive than recoveries from normal recessions.

That's certainly a fair argument. I haven't read the Rogoff-Reinhardt book, but their hypothesis seems reasonable, so let's accept it for purposes of this discussion. Should we therefore grade Obama on a curve? Perhaps, but it's also true that deep recessions usually are followed by more robust recoveries. And since the recent downturn was more severe than the the one in the early 1980s, shouldn't we be experiencing some additional growth to offset the tepidness associated with a financial crisis?

I doubt we'll ever know how to appropriately measure all of these factors, but I don't think that matters. I suspect Krugman and Klein are not particularly upset about Richard Rahn's comparisons of recessions and recoveries. The real argument is whether Reagan did the right thing by reducing the burden of government and whether Obama is doing the wrong thing by heading in the opposite direction and making America more like France or Greece. In other words, the fundamental issue is whether we should have big government or small government. I think the Obama Administration, by making government bigger, is repeating many of the mistakes of the Bush Administration. Krugman and Klein almost certainly disagree.

A Slam-Dunk Comparison

Both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama entered office during periods of economic misery. But they adopted dramatically different solutions. Reagan reduced the burden of government and Obama increased the burden of government. So which approach worked best? In his Washington Times column, Richard Rahn compares the economy's "recovery" performance under both Presidents. As you can see, Reaganomics is much better than Obamanomics.

I Don't Think Merkel is the new Reagan, but I May Change My Mind if This Is True

I've been very dismissive of supposed European "austerity" initiatives, in part because the term seems to describe politicians who want tax-financed government spending rather than Keynesian-style deficit-financed government spending. What really matters is reducing the burden of government spending, regardless of how those outlays are financed. But if this Financial Times report is true and Germany reduces total government spending next year by 3.8 percent, that would be a significant achievement. Indeed, the United States has not seen a one-year-to-the-next reduction in the burden of spending since the mid-1960s. I hope this is true and my pessimism is unwarranted, but I'm still a skeptic. I may be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the 3.8 percent cut is based on phony US-style budget accounting (a spending increase magically becomes a spending cut if the increase is not as big as politicians want) or some sort of budget shell game (like Obama's budget freeze, which exempted the vast majority of the budget).

Germany’s cabinet is poised this week to approve a 2011 budget as part of a four-year programme of public spending cuts meant to serve as an example to other European governments without jeopardising the country’s increasingly robust economic recovery. Briefing papers for Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, released by Berlin on Sunday, argue that by curbing spending – rather than increasing taxes – the €80bn ($100.3bn, £66bn) savings programme would differ “fundamentally” from previous fiscal squeezes and offer “noticeable, better growth possibilities”. ...Germany’s economy is enjoying an industry-led growth spurt, with engineers rehiring workers and returning production almost to pre-crisis levels. The stronger-than-expected growth and falls in unemployment were making it significantly easier for Germany to reduce its public sector deficit. ...the package “would differ fundamentally from earlier consolidation efforts”, avoiding “growth-hindering tax increases”. ...Overall government spending is seen as falling 3.8 per cent next year, with smaller reductions in subsequent years before federal elections in 2013.

America's Economy is Not Poised for another 1932...or another 1982

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK-based Telegraph has a very dismal outlook for the US economy. I'm more optimistic. While I think Obama's policies will prevent America from enjoying a Reagan-type boom, I don't think the current Administration is repeating all the mistakes of Hoover and Roosevelt, so I think a depression or double-dip recession is unlikely.

Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high. Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10pc of GDP. The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost. The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era. Jeff Weninger, of Harris Private Bank, said this compares with a peak of 21.2 weeks in the Volcker recession of the early 1980s. "Legions of individuals have been left with stale skills, and little prospect of finding meaningful work, and benefits that are being exhausted. By our math the crop of people who are unemployed but not receiving a check amounts to 9.2m." ...in the first quarter...the economy eked out a growth rate of just 2.7pc. This compares with 5.1pc, 9.3pc, 8.1pc and 8.5pc in the four quarters coming off recession in the early 1980s.

The Next Ronald Reagan?

Very rarely does one find a politician with the moral clarity to provide the blunt and necessary truth about a controversial issue, but that has finally happened. But this is a good news/bad news situation for American taxpayers. The good news is that a politician has proposed to slash both bureaucrat pay and public pensions and publicly stated that, "The state sector is like a fat man of 200kg sitting on the back of a 50kg little man who is the real economy." The bad news is that this politician is the President of Romania. A caveat is probably appropriate at this stage. I have no idea whether Presdident Basescu actually is a genuine small-government proponent. Perhaps he is just an ordinary politician forced to do the right thing by extraordinary circumstances. Nonetheless, I have a hard time imagining we will see a better quote from an elected official this year. Here's an excerpt from a story in the Irish Times:

President Traian Basescu said officials had decided...to reduce the pay of state employees by 25 per cent from next month and pensions and unemployment benefits by 15 per cent this year. ...He said the cutbacks would also help reinvigorate an economy that is being crushed by a bloated and inefficient state sector, and allow Romania to avoid steep tax hikes that could hamper investment and destroy hopes of a swift recovery from recession. “This plan was inevitable. The state sector is like a fat man of 200kg sitting on the back of a 50kg little man who is the real economy,” said Mr Basescu, who narrowly won re-election at the end of last year.

Obama's Weak Economy

I've explained on several occasions that Obama has a legitimate point when he says he inherited a mess. After all, Bush spent the economy into a ditch and the Fannie/Freddie/Federal Reserve-caused financial crisis put the economy into recession before Obama took office. That being said, economies normally rebound from a deep recession with a big recovery and this has not happened (at least so far) this time. The Wall Street Journal editorializes about how weak the current recover is compared to the Reagan expansion:

One way to judge the strength of a recovery is to compare it to the growth after downturns of similar severity. The best recent comparison to the recession of 2008-2009 would be that of 1981-1982. ...both periods had steep declines in output and jobless rates that hit 10%. The 1982 recession officially ended in November, and the recovery came roaring out of that year, gaining momentum throughout 1983 and carrying 8% growth into 1984 with an expansion that lasted six more years. ...By comparison to that boom, the current recovery has been about half as strong. ...The full incentive-enhancing impact of the 25% Reagan reduction in marginal tax rates finally kicked in on January 1, 1983.... At the same time, an era of deregulation was lowering costs across most industries. The groundwork for a durable expansion had been laid in lower taxes, lower inflation and lower business costs. In the current recovery, the policy headwinds are very different. Taxes are set to rise significantly on January 1, 2011, and the political class is signaling the need for still more taxes to pay for the costs of stimulus and the expanding entitlement state.

The Ronald Reagan of New Jersey?

He's only been Governor for a couple of months, and we have seen other elected officials start strong and then get captured by the special interests, but it certainly appears that Governor Christie of New Jersey genuinely intends to rescue his state from becoming the Greece of America. Here's an excerpt of what George Will just wrote, which included some spot-on analysis of the role of tax competition as a tool for constraining greedy politicians:

At the Pennsylvania end of the bridge, cigarette shops cluster: New Jersey's per-pack tax is double Pennsylvania's. In late afternoon, Gov. Chris Christie says, the bridge is congested with New Jersey government employees heading home to Pennsylvania, where the income tax rate is 3 percent, compared with New Jersey's top rate of 9 percent. There are 700,000 more Democrats than Republicans in New Jersey, but in November Christie flattened the Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine. Christie is built like a burly baseball catcher, and since his inauguration just 13 weeks ago, he has earned the name of the local minor-league team -- the Trenton Thunder. He inheritaged a $2.2 billion deficit, and next year's projected deficit of $10.7 billion is, relative to the state's $29.3 billion budget, the nation's worst. Democrats, with the verbal tic -- "Tax the rich!" -- that passes for progressive thinking, demanded that he reinstate the "millionaire's tax," which hit "millionaires" earning $400,000 until it expired Dec. 31. Instead, Christie noted that between 2004 and 2008 there was a net outflow of $70 billion in wealth as "the rich," including small businesses, fled. And he said previous administrations had "raised taxes 115 times in the last eight years alone." ...New Jersey's governors are the nation's strongest -- American Caesars, really -- who can veto line items and even rewrite legislative language. Christie is using his power to remind New Jersey that wealth goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well-treated. Prosperous states are practicing, at the expense of slow learners like New Jersey, "entrepreneurial federalism" ...competing to have the most enticing business climate.

Meanwhile, a column from the Wall Street Journal makes some of the same points, noting that productive people will move across borders when they reach a tipping point. This underscores the value of tax competition - which is made possible by federalism:

Mr. Christie has started spreading the news that the Garden State aims to compete once again for businesses, jobs and residents. He notes that for years the state offered a better tax environment than New York, which encouraged city dwellers to discover New Jersey's beautiful suburbs. Mr. Christie says that he recently bumped into former New York Gov. George Pataki, who noted that he'd been shocked to learn that New Jersey now has an even higher burden than its tax-crazy neighbor. "See what happens when you're not looking?" he said to Mr. Pataki. "Snuck right up on ya." The governor aims to move tax rates back to the glory days before 2004, when politicians lifted the top income tax rate to its current level of almost 9% from roughly 6%. Piled on top of the country's highest property taxes, as well as sales and business income taxes, the increase brought the state to a tipping point where the affluent started to flee in droves. A Boston College study recently noted the outflow of wealthy people from the state in the period 2004-2008. The state has lately been in a vicious spiral of new taxes and fees to make up for the lost revenue, which in turn causes more high-income residents to leave, further reducing tax revenues.

Defending the Honor of Drunken Sailors

Very funny, though it is also tragic if you really think about it. I recall Reagan using a line like this in his speeches, though perhaps that is just my aging memory playing tricks on me.

Bush Was a Statist, not a Conservative

A former White House speechwriter, Mark Thiessen, has jumped to the defense of his former boss, writing for the Washington Post that George W. Bush "established a conservative record without parallel." Even by the loose standards of Washington, that is a jaw-dropping assertion. I've been explaining for years that Bush was a big-government advocate, even writing a column back in 2007 for the Washington Examiner pointing out that Clinton had a much better economic record from a free-market perspective. I also groused to the Wall Street Journal the following year about Bush's dismal performance.

"Bush doesn't have a conservative legacy" on the economy, said Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Tax-rate reductions are the only positive achievement, and those are temporary ... Everything else that has happened has been permanent, and a step toward more statism." He cited big increases in the federal budget, along with continuing subsidies in agriculture and transportation, new Medicare drug benefits, and increased federal intervention in education and housing.

Let's review the economic claims in Mr. Thiessen's column. He writes:

The thrust of their argument is that Bush expanded the size of government dramatically -- and they are absolutely right. Federal spending grew significantly on Bush’s watch, and this is without question a black mark on his record. (Federal spending also grew dramatically under Ronald Reagan, though he was dealt a Democratic Congress, whereas Bush had six years of Republican leadership on Capitol Hill.)

Since federal spending almost doubled in Bush's eight years, it's tempting to summarily dismiss this assertion, but let's cite a few additional facts just in case someone is under the illusion that Bush was on the side of taxpayers. And let's specifically compare Bush to Reagan since Mr. Thiessen seems to think they belong in the same ball park. This article by Veronique de Rugy is probably a good place to begin since it compares all Presidents and shows that Bush was a big spender compared to Reagan...and to Clinton. But the most damning evidence comes from the OMB's Historical Tables, which show that Reagan reduced both entitlements and domestic discretionary spending as a share of GDP during his two terms. Bush (and I hope nobody is suprised) increased the burden of spending in both of these categories.That's the spending side of the ledger. Let's now turn to tax policy, where Thiessen writes:

Bush enacted the largest tax cuts in history -- and unlike my personal hero, Ronald Reagan, he never signed a major tax increase into law.

Using the most relevant measures, such as changes in marginal tax rates or comparing the impact of each President's tax changes on revenues as a share of GDP, Bush's tax cuts are far less significant than the Reagan tax cuts. But there presumably is some measure, perhaps nominal revenues over some period of years, showing the Bush tax cuts are larger, so we'll let that claim slide. The more relevant issue to address is the legacy of each President. Reagan did sign several tax increases after his 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, but the cumulative effect of those unfortunate compromises was relatively modest compared to the positive changes in his first year. When he left office, he bequeathed to the nation a tax code with meaningful and permanent tax rate reductions. The Bush tax cuts, by contrast, expire at the end of this year, and virtually all of the pro-growth provisions will disappear. This doesn't mean Bush's record on taxes was bad, but it certainly does not compare to the Gipper's. But what about other issue, such as trade? Driessen writes:

Bush enacted free-trade agreements with 17 nations, more than any president in history.

Those are some positive steps, to be sure, but they are offset by the protectionist moves on steel and lumber. I'm not a trade expert, so I don't know if Bush was a net negative or a net positive, but at best it's a muddled picture and Driessen certainly did not present the full story. And speaking of sins of omission, his section on health care notes:

Bush created Health Savings Accounts – the most important free-market health-care reform in a generation. And he courageously stood up to Congressional Democrats when they sought to use the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to nationalize health care -- and defeated their efforts.

Conveniently missing from this analysis, though, is any mention of the utterly irresponsible prescription drug entitlement. There is no doubt that Bush's net impact on healthcare was to saddle America with more statism. Indeed, I'd be curious to see some long-run numbers on the impact of Bush's prescription drug entitlement and the terrible plan Obama just imposed on America. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the negative fiscal impact of both plans was comparable. Shifting gears, let's now turn to education policy, where Driessen writes:

Bush won a Supreme Court ruling declaring school vouchers constitutional and enacted the nation's first school-choice program in the District of Columbia.

Bush deserves some credit on school choice, but his overall education record is characterized by more spending and centralization. Thanks in part to his no-bureaucrat-left-behind plan, the budget for the Department of Education grew signicantly and federal spending on elementary, secondary, and vocational education more than doubled. Equally worrisome, federal bureaucrats gained more control over education policy. Finally, Thiessen brags about Bush's record on Social Security reform:

Bush fought valiantly for a conservative priority no American president had ever dared to touch: Social Security reform, with private accounts that would have given millions of our citizens a stake in the free market system. His effort failed, but he deserves credit from conservatives for staking his second term in office on this effort.

This is an area where the former President does deserve some credit. So even though the White House's failure to ever put forth a specific proposal was rather frustrating, at least Bush did talk about real reform and the country would be better off today if something had been enacted.

This addresses all the economic claims in Driessen's article, but we can't give Bush a complete grade until we examine some of the other issues that were missing from the column. On regulatory issues, the biggest change implemented during the Bush year was probably Sarbanes-Oxley - a clear example of regulatory overkill. Another regulatory change, which turned out to be a ticking time bomb, was the expansion of the "affordable-lending" requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And speaking of Fannie and Freddie, no analysis of Bush's record would be complete without a discussion of bailouts. Without getting too deep in the issue, the most galling part of what Bush did was not necessarily recapitalizing the banking system (a good chunk of which was required by government deposit insurance anyhow), but rather the way it happened. During the savings & loan bailout 20 years ago, at least incompentent executives and negligent shareholders were wiped out. Government money was used, but only to pay off depositors and/or to pay healthy firms to absorb bankrupt institutions. Bush and Paulson, by contrast, exacerbated all the moral hazard issues by resucing the executives and shareholders who helped create the mess. Last but not least, let's not forget that Bush got the ball rolling on auto-industry bailouts.

If all of this means Bush is a "conservative record without parallel," then Barack Obama must be the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

Good Advice for Republicans from Tom Sowell

I've always been mystified by GOP politicians, pollsters, and consultants who argue that the GOP needs to support big government in order to win votes. The biggest victories for Republicans in living memory, after all, are the 1980 and 1994 landslides, when the GOP was most aggressive in promoting an anti-government message. The big-government, compassionate-conservative message of Bush, by contrast, led to electoral debacles in 2006 and 2008. Tom Sowell has been addressing the strange predilection of some Republicans to tack left. In his third column of the series, Sowell explains that the GOP should use an explicitly conservative message to appeal to black voters rather than foolishly assuming that a "me-too" platform will somehow work:

One of the things that is long overdue is some Republican re-thinking-- or perhaps thinking for the first time-- about the approach that they have been using, with consistently disastrous results, for trying to get the black vote. ...There is no point today in Republicans continuing to try to win over the average black voter by acting like imitation Democrats. Those who like what the Democrats are doing are going to vote for real Democrats. ...[Blacks] want their children to get a decent education, which they are unlikely to get so long as public schools are a monopoly run for the benefit of the teachers' unions, instead of for the education of the children. Democrats are totally in hock to the teachers' unions, which means that Republicans have a golden opportunity to go after the votes of black parents by connecting the dots and exposing one of the key reasons for bad education in inner cities and the bad consequences that follow. But when have you ever heard a Republican candidate get up and hammer the teachers' unions for blocking every attempt to give parents-- black or white-- the choice of where to send their children? The teachers' unions are going to be against the Republicans, whether Republicans hammer them or keep timidly quiet. Why not talk straight to black voters about the dire consequences of the pubic school monopoly that the teachers' unions and the Democrats protect at all cost, even though many private schools-- notably the KIPP schools in various states-- have achieved remarkable success with low-income and minority youngsters?

In his fourth column in the series, Sowell makes the common-sense point that a squishy, moderate message winds up appealing to nobody. That doesn't guarantee a lost election, to be sure. As Bush and Nixon showed, a milquetoast Republican can prevail if facing an incompetent Democrat in the right national climate, but those often turn out to be Pyrrhic victories since they often set the stage for big Democratic victories in the future. As Sowell notes, Reagan is the right model for the GOP:

A long-standing battle within the Republican Party, going back at least as far as the 1940s, is between those who want the party to clearly differentiate itself from the Democrats and those who seek a broader appeal by catering to a wider spectrum of social and ideological groups. The "smart money" advocates a "big tent" and deplores those who want a clearer adherence to the kinds of ideas espoused by Ronald Reagan. What the "smart money" fails to explain is how Reagan won two landslide presidential elections in a row. He certainly didn't do it by trying to act like Democrats. That's how the Republicans later turned off their own supporters, without gaining enough other voters to keep from being wiped out by the Democrats in two consecutive elections. ...When you try to waffle and be all things to all people, you can end up being nothing to anybody. That is where the "smart money" crowd have gotten the Republicans in recent years.

The American People Reject Big Government

According to a Washington Post story, Obama wants to be the anti-Reagan, a President who permanently changes the American people's attitude about big government. Obama's efforts to make statism popular, however, are not exactly working out as he hoped. According to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, the American people have become much more libertarian when asked if that want a bigger government with more services or a smaller government with fewer services. But this is just part of the story. As David Boaz points out, more accurate polling data, which mentions that bigger government also means higher taxes, reveals that support for small government becomes even more pronounced. Here's an excerpt from the Post story:

Could he restore confidence in government, even as he was proposing the biggest federal intervention in the domestic economy in a generation? ...As Obama marks the first anniversary of his inauguration on Wednesday, that question remains one of the most politically charged of his presidency -- and central to the politics of this election year -- and will hinge on how Americans judge Obama and his policies. Will the public conclude that his policies worked, however much they may cost and however much they may entail more government intervention in the economy? Or will they regard his agenda as intrusive and ineffective big government? What steps may Obama take to alleviate public discontent over these first-year decisions? ...Obama receives mixed reviews for his first-year performance, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. His approval rating stands at 53 percent, with 44 percent disapproving. Among independents, 49 percent approve, the lowest of any of his recent predecessors at this point in their presidencies. ...The poll also shows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country's problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services. Since he won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger government has moved in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points.

The Reagan Tax Cuts, Budget Forecasting, and Government Revenue

While perusing the Internet, I saw an article by Iwan Morgan, who is the author of The Age of Deficits: Presidents and unbalanced Budgets from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. The author asserted that, "The deficit explosion on his watch was a nasty surprise for Ronald Reagan not a deliberate strategy to reduce government. In his rosy interpretation of Laffer curve theory, the personal tax cuts he promoted in 1981 would deliver higher not lower revenues through their boost to economic growth." The first sentence is an interesting interpretation, since many leftists believe that Reagan deliberately created deficits to make it more difficult for Democrats in Congress to increase spending. I'm agnostic on that issue, but Morgan definitely errs (or is grossly incomplete) in the second sentence. The Reagan Administration did not employ dynamic scoring when predicting the revenue impact of its tax rate reductions. It is true that the White House failed to predict the drop in revenues, particularly in 1982, but that happened because of both the second stage of the 1980-82 double-dip recession and the unexpected drop in inflation (the Congressional Budget Office also failed to predict both of these events, so Reagan's forecasters were hardly alone in their mistake). Moreover, Morgain's dismissal of the Laffer Curve is unwarranted. While several GOP politicians exaggerated the relationship between tax rates, taxable income, and tax revenue, this does not mean it does not exist. The table below, which is based on data from the IRS's Statistics of Income, shows what happened to tax collections from upper-income taxpayers between 1980 and 1988. Supply siders can be criticized for many things, especially their apparent disregard for the importance of limiting the size of government, but the IRS figures clearly show that lower tax rates were followed by more rich people, more taxable income, and more tax revenue. For those keeping score at home, that's a perfect batting average for supply-side economics.

Communism Was - and Still Is - Evil

This Reason.tv video reminds us about the horrors of totalitarian oppression. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a tremendous victory for freedom and could be Ronald Reagan's greatest accomplishment.