Reagan's Debts

 



There is much debate among historians over the budget deficits former President Ronald Reagan ran up in the 1980's. The main reason for that controversy is that Reagan was a fiscal conservative, so shouldn't the national debt have shrunk rather that grown while he was office? Yet that's not what happened, as the budget was never balanced a single year of his two term presidency. There are two main theories about why that happened.

One is that Reagan simply lacked the authority to balance the budget. Under the U.S. Constitution all spending must originate in Congress. The President has no power over how much Congress chooses to spend, other than to veto bills considered too expensive. Reagan continually vetoed expensive legislation passed by Congress, but the problem was that Reagan controlled the Senate for only the start of his presidency and never controlled the House. 

That meant that Reagan's vetoes were repeatedly overridden by Congress. Therefore, some historians have argued that the Reagan era deficits should more properly be called the Tip O'Neil deficits, because that was who was Speaker of the House when Congress passed the unbalanced budgets over Reagan's objections. This argument says that Reagan would have gladly balanced the budget, but Congress, which has final authority over the purse strings, never allowed him to.

However, there was another, more cynical explanation put forward by some of Reagan's critics. According to this view, Reagan secretly favored running up the debt, because in the long run that would spoil any plans to expand the size and scope of government, since it would become unaffordable to do so. These critics claimed that Reagan was purposely "starving the government" by running up debts that he hoped would all but slam the door on new government spending, which as an advocate of small government Reagan opposed.

Which theory you believe depends a lot upon your view of Reagan. If you like him, you probably favor the theory that it was all the congressional Democrat's fault. If you don't like him, then you might favor the notion that Reagan cynically used deficit spending to strangle any chances for government expansion.

Therefore in the end it may well be the ghost of Ronald Reagan who has the last laugh. 

 

Solidarity

Hey, put this up on your website or facebook or whatever to show support for the Twitter Revolution in Iran.



Deerfield Day

Yesterday I went to the crafts fair in historic Deerfield. Here I am outside a colonial house. 

In the center of town is this massive tree, which is at least three hundred years old.

This monument erected in 1867 honors both the Civil War veterans and those who died in the Indian wars.

Here's the entrance to the crafts fair.

Unfortunately I have no pictures from inside the fair because cameras are forbidden. A copyrighted crafts fair? Apparently they have a problem with people photographing the craft designs and then copying them. Who knew that the crafts fair world was so cut-throat competitive?

Actually, you'd be surprised how often what appears to be a harmless area of commerce is actually a snake pit. I'm told that if you park your hotdog and snack truck in the wrong location in Springfield, you will get death threats from the local mob. 

A friend of mine used to be in the soda delivery business, bringing the canisters of soda and removing the empty ones to and from restaurants and bars. You would think that would be a nice, wholesome business, but he told me it was unbelievable how bitter the turf battles were between which companies would get what contracts to service what outlets. Vandalism, dirty tricks, nothing was off limits in the dog eat dog soda pop world. Who'd a thunk?

How True

A t-shirt I saw today at the Amherst Survival Center. 

 


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