Keith Griffith reports at the DailyMail.com about the latest pronouncement from a top Reagan-era economic adviser.

Former President Ronald Reagan’s famed top economic advisor Arthur B. Laffer has slammed President Joe Biden’s approach to inflation as ‘exactly the opposite’ of what is needed to tame soaring consumer prices, speaking to DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

On Wednesday, new federal data showed the consumer price index hit a 7 percent annual gain in December, the fastest increase since June 1982, when Reagan was fighting to rein in soaring inflation.

Reagan swept into office in the 1980 election on his vow to contain inflation, which had hit a staggering 14 percent that year under President Jimmy Carter. 

‘Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man,’ Reagan famously said on the campaign trail, and voters responded to the message, delivering him a mandate to take decisive action.

Reagan’s economic approach had four key pillars: reducing taxes, cutting non-defense government spending, slashing regulations, and tightening the money supply with stricter central bank policy. 

Critics derided the plan, but on balance it worked, and inflation returned to single digits in the first year of Reagan’s term, hit a reasonable 2.5 percent in August 1983, and remained below 5 percent for his remaining years in office. 

‘It was exactly the reverse of what is happening with Biden and the current era,’ said Laffer, 81, in a booming and gregarious phone interview from his offices in Nashville. ‘The polices are exactly the opposite, so the results are the opposite.’

‘While Reagan healed the sick, Biden has infected the healthy. While Reagan cured inflation, Biden is creating inflation,’ he added. 

Laffer, who served as a member of Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board, is best known as a pioneer of supply-side economics, and promoter of the Laffer Curve, which holds that in some cases reducing taxes can increase government revenue by stimulating growth.