A moose eats berries from a tree in downtown Anchorage, Alaska, Saturday, Jan. 13, 2007, as the Alaska flag, in background, flies at half-staff in honor of former President Gerald R. Ford. (AP Photo/Al Grillo)
Posted on 01/12/2007 1:45:53 PM PST by NormsRevenge
I wonder if it would be possible to add this to the title:
(also called Reagan a 'poor manager')
The topic might get more hits that way.
A moose eats berries from a tree in downtown Anchorage, Alaska, Saturday, Jan. 13, 2007, as the Alaska flag, in background, flies at half-staff in honor of former President Gerald R. Ford. (AP Photo/Al Grillo)
The best way to restore confidence in a currency medium and long term is for a government to stop wasteful spending and to let its economy grow, and Reagan did that. Hiking interest rates and currency interventions can be a good short term measure to change the direction of a currency. But induced recessions and other forms of economic pain are simply unnecessary. They do make the Federal Reserve look powerful and satisfy the sadist side of many.
My only point is that you thereby criticize Reagan too. This was his policy also, or at any rate one that he fully agreed with and recognized the absolute necessity of, as the groundwork of and integral to the rest of his economic policy. (Of course I recognize that the President has no direct control over the Fed except in the appointment power.)
Look, there is just NO other way to kill inflation than by tightening the money supply (i.e. hiking interest rates). Nothing else works, and everything else had been tried by Reagan's predecessors; Nixon, Carter and Ford.
The availability of money is what drives inflation. Of course the availability of money is also (a necessary part of) what drives the growth of the economy. Inflationary economies are even more dependent on money to sustain economic growth, precisely because so much of its value gets eaten up by inflation.
If you tighten money sufficient to kill inflation you WILL contract the economy, temporarily, because you're also cutting the supply of money necessary to sustain growth in an inflationary economy. This however is necessary to create the conditions for long term real economic growth.
Every time and anywhere high inflation has been successfully conquered it's always been achieved by tight money policy, and the initiation of this policy has always and everywhere created significant economic pain in the short term.
But induced recessions and other forms of economic pain are simply unnecessary.
You are absolutely wrong about that. In the condition of an inflationary economy, recession, in the short term, is an absolutely unavoidable consequence of tight money policy, and tight money policy is the ONLY way to stop runaway inflation.
Good point. And this is what makes Ford's claim bogus that it wasn't Reagan, but he (Ford), that should be credited with undermining the legitimacy of the Soviet Union because it was he (Ford) who had negotiated the Helsinki Accords.
But in the short term the Helsinki Accords shored up the legitimacy of the Soviet Union in effectively recognizing and securing their post WWII gains in Eastern Europe.
Ford never utilized the human rights aspects of the Accords to undermine the Soviet Union. It was Reagan who innovated in this respect. And it was dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, who Reagan supported at every opportunity (including MAKING opportunities), and who Ford pointedly ignored so as not to "provoke" the Soviets, who successfully pressured the international community to set up the organs, which Reagan then aggressively used, to implement the human rights aspects of the Accords.
Disagree -- tax cuts are inherently anti-inflationary. They do not increase the money supply - they simply transfer resources from the wasteful, inefficient public sector to the much less wasteful, much more efficient and productive private sector. Thus tax cuts make the economy more efficient. The text book definition of efficiency says it is increased when outputs from a system (in this case, our economy) are increased relative to the inputs. As you noted, inflation is defined as too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. Tax cuts increase the outputs of the economy and thus are a perfect policy response to the problem of inflation.
I suppose you can kill inflation s-l-o-w-l-y with very gradual tightening of the money supply, but this only lengthens the period of economic pain. You can't avoid it. Much better to do it quickly, like pulling off a bandaid. Volker did the right thing, as Reagan always recognized and affirmed. (Admittedly some of Reagan's aids and lieutenants went "wobbly" on monetary policy during the recessionary period, but to my recollection Reagan himself never did.)
Re MCA; a small and little known fact is that in 1967 MCA funded a small group of Caltech grads and others to do some research on digital imaging, resulting in the very first digital disk being made and replayed with full color and sound from a TV program. The whole thing was done with a budget of less than 2.5 mil with the whole idea and patents sold to Phillips in the Netherlands.... now you know where your DVD's came from......
Jimmy Carter drinks toilet water.
"Jimmy Carter was the worst Prez of the 20th century without doubt !!!"
Lyndon Johnson was worse.
How about FDR?
Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were both third-rate minds who were incapable of understanding economics. Their confusion was the result of laziness (all they had to do was read Milton Friedman), and hanging out with beltway liberals.
Their habit of publicly criticizing the Republican presidents who followed them showed they were brothers under the skin.
The only useful thing either of them ever did was pave the way for Ronald Reagan through their gross incompetence.
And, of course, neither of them ever forgave Reagan for succeeding.
LOL!
I'd just like to know what Ford was thinking when he allowed all those criticisms of Republicans to be released as soon as he died.
Did it not occur to him that the drive-by media would take advantage of the publicity of his death to highlight those criticisms?
Or did he intend it that way? If so, then he stabbed his fellow Republicans in the back.
He should have allowed the interviews to released a year after his death or something like that.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the government printing presses . . .
The classic short route to massive inflation has always been printing money without anything solid to back it up. (As in the American Revolution, the Confederacy, South American banana republics, and most recently the attempts by certain rogue nations to flood the U.S. with counterfeit currency to cause inflation.)
This was explained in easy-to-understand terms by Milton Friedman in his television series "Free to Choose" and book by the same title.
His writings, by the way, not only influenced Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, they were circulated underground behind the Iron Curtain before it fell in 1989.
Yup. Kissinger's celebrated "pragmatism" enabled our enemies nearly as much as did Carter's unilateral capitulation.
carter disaster
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