Wednesday's WSJ featured a piece by Peter Ferrara, a Reagan Administration official, in which he did a nice compare and contrast job, then versus now. Perhaps the best thing about this piece was the photo it accompanied: "Ronald Reagan and Paul Volker, July, 1981", taken in the Oval Office. I thought I felt a tear starting to well up.
Indeed, there were giants in those days. These two men inherited a mess that makes today's pale. "What we suffer with today is not the worst economy since the Great Depression, but the worst since Jimmy Carter - the last time liberals were dominant politically and intellectually", accurately notes Mr. Ferrara. A couple of statistical examples: inflation ran at 13.2% in 1980, and unemployment eclipsed 10% in 1982. In the fall of 1980, the 30-year mortgate rate reached nearly 18.5%!
It seemed there might be no way out of that mess. With inflation running high, and, more importantly,
expectations of future inflation running even higher, the cost of borrowing money was in the stratosphere. Who's going to lend money at rates lower than inflation? The upshot of this was that there was no way enough borrowing would occur to generate sufficient growth to drive down unemployment. Any effort to stimulate the economy through deficit spending, or through monetary stimulus, would be met immediately by rising interest rates, as money markets therefore expected yet higher inflation. Thus was born the term "stagflation", to describe the theretofore inconceivable phenomenon (under Keynesian theory) in which high unemployment and high inflation co-existed. The "Keynesians" were flummoxed.
Ronald Reagan had an approach no one else gave much thought to - incentivize "economic activists" to work, invest, and produce. This was revolutionary! In fact, it was the essence of the "Reagan Revolution". Taking the focus off of federal schemes managed by self-satisfied wiz kids getting a government check, and return it to those who actually create the real wealth. For reasons I'll describe more fully below, this approach - amazingly, in hindsight - was ridiculed almost universally by elites in Washington and the national media.
The Reagan approach, as described by Mr. Ferrara, was in four parts. First, lower tax rates across-the-board, to encourage work and investment by thereby increasing after-tax returns. Second, deregulate industry to remove unnecessary costs, again increasing returns on investment. Third, control/limit federal spending, and fourth, with the help of Mr. Volker, institute a tight, anti-inflationary monetary policy. These last two elements served to create confidence that inflation might be controlled, and thus future profits earned in non-inflated dollars.
The results were spectacularly successful. Inflation was cut to 6.2% in 1982, then to 3.2% in 1983. The infamous "misery index" (a term coined by President Reagan to describe the combined inflation and unemployment rates), dropped from 22 percent in 1980, to 7.7% by the end of 1986 (it's probably running in the 11-12% range currently).
Why was this seemingly common-sense approach to recovery so revolutionary, and so reviled? Chief Justice John Marshall famously remarked that "the power to tax is the power to destroy". With apologies, I'd like to alter that famous formulation just a little. "The power to tax is the power to
control", as I see it, and there's nothing political elites and aspirants like more than the thrill of control.
(Part 2 will address the rise of Keynes, and how his theory of aggregate demand ostensibly gave license to the political class to manipulate the economy through Soviet-style central planning. What could be more fun than to spend other people's money, in the cause of (social) justice?)