Sunday, 5 February 2011, marked what would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday were he still alive. I view Reagan as the greatest American president of the 20th century. This should be no surprise. In case you’re curious, I choose Washington in the 18th century and Lincoln in the 19th century. I’d even say Reagan should be added to Mount Rushmore. Most people I meet seem to think FDR trumped Reagan for 20th century greatness. Both presidents certainly inherited awful circumstances from their predecessors, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.
I’d rate FDR and Reagan roughly even in terms of foreign policy. FDR led us to victory in World War 2 and Reagan led us to victory in the Cold War, though the final successes of both were seen during their successors’ presidencies, namely Harry Truman and Papa Bush. They both had monumental victories, but each also had blunders. FDR’s stemmed mainly from not being aggressive enough with tariff reduction and Reagan’s most notable was the Iran Contra affair. Either way, both FDR’s and Reagan’s foreign policy successes far outweighed their failures. I’m not going to try to argue one was better.
So, if they were equal on foreign policy, how can I say Reagan was greater than FDR? Simple – domestic policy. FDR’s New Deal programs not only failed to end the Great Depression, they actually made the Great Depression worse and longer than it had to be. I’ve contended previously that World War 2 ended the Great Depression, but Truman’s post-war policies enabled the post-depression recovery. FDR’s fiscal policy was not sound and neither was monetary policy during the 1930’s.
Reaganomics, on the other hand, was one half of the recipe that killed stagflation. Reagan cut a lot of taxes in the name of supply side economics. The father of supply side economics, Andrew Mellon, was the Secretary of the Treasury throughout the 1920’s. Mellon relentlessly slashed tax rates and the results were a prospering economy and increased government tax revenues. Yes, lower tax rates yielded higher tax revenue. Reaganomics had similar results.
Reaganomics was just one half. The other half was Paul Volcker’s willingness as Federal Reserve Chairman to raise rates high enough to kill inflation, then lower rates once it was clear inflation was under control. Volcker was a holdover from the previous administration. Sound fiscal policy from Reagan was combined with sound monetary policy from Volcker. In essence, Volcker killed the ‘flation’ and Reagan killed the ‘stag’.
A couple footnotes. First, just as Reagan cannot be fully credit for Volcker’s monetary policy successes, FDR cannot be fairly blamed for his Federal Reserve’s monetary failures. However, Reagan does deserve credit for creating the political climate that made Volcker’s actions possible. Second, Reagan and FDR initially faced two distinctly different economic crises, stagflation versus deflation, making an apples-to-apples comparison difficult. But, once Volcker killed inflation and once the early 1930’s deflation panic subsided, both FDR and Reagan had moribund economies. Granted, FDR’s was in way worse shape than Reagan’s, but results still matter. Reagan’s policies worked and FDR’s didn’t. An intriguing historical what-if would be seeing how Reaganomics would fair against the Great Depression. In any event, with foreign policy being largely equal and Reagan winning in domestic policy, it’s pretty reasonable to say that Reagan was the greatest 20th century president.
While we’re on the topic of Reagan, the media has put in quite the effort recently to paint Obama as a more Reagan-like figure, as though that’s a good thing (and it is). I find this fascinating because, from what I know of the news during Reagan’s presidency (admittedly not much first-hand knowledge because I had just turned six years old when Reagan left office in 1989), the liberal media hated Reagan passionately. It was pretty much exclusively liberal media before Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the internet were there to act as some counterbalance to the media’s liberal bias.
This report is interesting reading for all. It’s basically the greatest hits collection of the anti-Reagan crowd, so they’ll like it. The pro-Reagan crowd gets a glimpse of how truly hated Reagan was by the media.
And, people like me who are often critical of the media for blurring the line between information and opinion get plenty of ammunition to back our critique. Yes, I criticize both sides for this and Fox is just as guilty for the conservatives as their liberal brethren. I’ll post more on this in the future, too.
Links: http://www.mrc.org/specialreports/uploads/Reagan2011.pdf
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