Posted on 06/06/2004 4:43:02 AM PDT by billorites
As Ronald Reagan leaves office, the nation still has not quite taken his measure. Even his critics like the guy, and even his friends often sound disappointed. Someone ought to say that his is likely to prove the most epochal presidency since Franklin D. Roosevelt's.
Not the least of Mr. Reagan's accomplishments is how much the nation has forgotten. He took office in the very shadow of a hostage crisis, remember? Remember gasoline lines? Remember double-digit inflation and interest rates twice today's? Remember Watergate? Remember Vietnam? As Ronald Reagan hands over the reins tomorrow, the first President since Eisenhower to complete two terms, he leaves quite a different America.
It cannot be all luck, and it is not likely to vanish as the outgoing President leaves center stage. Indeed, as the years give us more perspective, it's likely to become increasingly clear that the Reagan years and the Reagan policies have left their imprint on the national mind.
The onetime opponent who coined the phrase "voodoo economics," for example, is now Ronald Reagan's successor, proclaiming "read my lips." Nowhere, indeed, is the Reagan legacy more obvious than in economic policy. After we have listened to all the complaints about the deficits he leaves behind, the fact remains that we are now in a record peacetime economic expansion, that inflation has been reined in and enormous numbers of jobs have been created. And as Edmund Burke observed, "Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time."
Beyond that, the Cassandras are getting boring; why should their constantly repeated refrains suddenly come true this time? In fact, the federal deficit as officially but dubiously measured fell from 6.3% of GNP in fiscal 1983 to 3.2% in 1988. This had no discernible effect on the decibel level of warnings of doom or pleas for higher taxes. The trend is right; the ultimate size of the deficit depends on whether spending restraint and economic growth can be continued after Mr. Reagan leaves office.
The deficit complaints, indeed, measure Mr. Reagan's success in changing the politics of economic policy. He chose to fight the size-of-government issue on the tax side, instead of merely offering tax cuts as a reward for spending discipline. Revenues have been increasing smartly with economic growth, but have been roughly capped as a percentage of GNP. To spend more, the government has to borrow, an activity both financially expensive and politically unrewarding. And behold, the growth rate of government spending has declined, and the deficit with it.
The most important Reagan economic legacy, of course, is the tax rate. When he came into office, federal tax rates reached 70%. As he leaves, the highest rate in the code is 33% in an upper-middle-income notch, dropping to 28% if earnings rise into the highest bracket. Current economic growth started in 1983, when the first true tax cuts became effective and it continues to surprise experts.
The Reagan tax policies are being imitated throughout the world. With the Reagan example and Reagan rhetoric on deregulation, there is also a renewal of interest in market mechanisms around the world, even in nations that call themselves socialist or communist. And despite protectionist pressures, President Reagan and Prime Minister Mulroney leave the legacy of the Canadian-American free-trade agreement.
The Reagan economic policies are not uniformly recognized as the success they are because of the 1982 recession, widely blamed on tax cuts and deficits. In retrospect it seems more reasonable to conclude that the recession was the cost of wringing inflation out of the economy, indeed that even the partial and staggered tax cuts in 1981 and 1982 moderated the effects of tight money. In 1979, we were on the brink of a world-wide inflation. The combination of Paul Volcker's monetary policy and Ronald Reagan's tax policy allowed us to stem that danger without the world depression many would have predicted. This is an accomplishment of historic proportions.
< SNIP >
Now of course, none of these accomplishments are the work of one man. Tax reform was in the air as early as 1978, with the Steiger cut in capital-gains rates and Proposition 13 in California. Paul Volcker was appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979. The same congressional Democrats who resisted funding freedom fighters in Nicaragua helped fund them in faraway Afghanistan. President Reagan maneuvered and compromised, but he managed to seize the opportunities history and politics offered him, keeping his goals in sight in what some saw as a simple-minded way.
Inevitably, of course, there is a negative side to any President's ledger. Only the barest start has been made on the final keystone of economic reform, the stabilization of disruptive exchange rates in an integrated world economy. The blunder of allowing the Iranian mission to turn into a ransom operation, though we sympathize with its initial geostrategic purposes, cost the President a year of potential accomplishment. The failure to defend his own personnel, indeed sometimes allowing his own people to join the attack, has been repaid in the coin of lost loyalty. We persist in believing the White House could have prevented the biggest political disgrace of its term, the scurrilous defeat of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, if it had been awake to the general attack on its personnel.
Nor, similarly, did President Reagan show great institutional loyalty to the office he held. He was willing to sign legislation like the special-prosecutor laws, not inclined to make much use of the veto, unwilling to use his pardon power for political defense, or to confront Congress on such tactics as continuing resolutions. The flow of institutional power out of the executive and into Congress started with Vietnam and Watergate, and President Reagan has made little attempt to reverse or even stem it. We would mark this as the greatest failing of his tenure.
In an irony he perhaps shares with all epochal political leaders, Ronald Reagan was both beloved and intensely polarizing. The same simplicity that infuriated his critics charmed the people. But the Reagan charm carried a policy agenda and modes of thought that will not leave with him. Old issues and concerns have simply vanished. Whatever happened to the "counterculture?" Today the culture, and the young generation that has known only the Reagan presidency, is more likely to enshrine the Norman Rockwell virtues he somehow managed to embody. And many once-controversial parts of the Reagan agenda are working their way into the conventional wisdom. Almost no one wants to return to high marginal tax rates, for example, and opponents of SDI are toying with missile defense against accidental launches.
In this President Reagan leaves his successor the enormous opportunity to pursue the same agenda in a way that is no longer polarizing, that part of the job having been done. A generation after Ronald Reagan was first elected Governor of California, his political imprint is still writ large on the state. So it will be with the nation after he leaves as President.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
bookmark bump
The entire scope of the Reagan legacy may not be known or fully appreciated for twenty, or fifty, or a hundred years from now. His "shining city on a hill" example will live on into the far reaches of time, and collections of his wit and wisdom will be tomes studied by learned scholars in some future pursuit of advanced degrees.
A truly significant man lived among us, for just a little while. But in his passage, he illuminated, he guided, he inspired his fellow human beings in a way few men of the 20th Century ever could, with a positive optimism and a sincere belief in the better nature of man, that could almost convince even skeptics that saints and angels do exist, and visit earth from time to time.
A Lincolnesque figure.
They put their own political ambitions completely aside in service to their country and what they believed needed to be accomplished.
In short, they did the right thing and the world is a better place for their efforts.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.