The 40th president did a better job helping the poor than the 44th president

Robert Morris University economics professor Ralph Reiland explains in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review why President Obama’s most vocal supporters ought to take a closer look at the record of one of his recent predecessors.

I think the poor need another Reagan in the White House.

The income of black heads-of-households dropped by 10.9 percent from June 2009 to June 2013. This decline in black income is more than double the overall 4.4 percent drop nationally in real, adjusted for inflation, median household income during the same four years of alleged “recovery.”

Similarly, real incomes of those under age 25 fell by 9.6 percent over the same period — again, more than double the average drop in household income.

Income in households headed by single women, with or without children, declined by approximately 7 percent over the same four years, a significantly higher drop than the national average.

The income of Hispanic heads-of-households fell by 4.5 percent, slightly more than the national decline, while the income of workers with a high school diploma or less dropped by 6.9 percent.

In dollar terms, the median income per year (including cash government benefits such as earned income tax credits, disability payments and unemployment insurance) in female-headed households and black households has dropped, respectively, by $2,300 and over $4,000 since Obama’s stimulus-led “recovery” began in June 2009. …

… In contrast to these overall income declines in the past four years, especially among groups with the lowest incomes, a Congressional Budget Office report, “Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates: 1979 to 2005,” showed across-the-board gains in income, with incomes growing at roughly the same pace for all groups, following the implementation of President Reagan’s pro-growth, pro-business economic policies in the 1980s.

The CBO report shows that after-tax household income, adjusted for inflation, increased overall by 13.73 percent from 1983 to 1993 and by 12 percent in the lowest income quintile, reversing the overall decline in household income in the 1970s produced by high levels of inflation and unemployment (the misery index, the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate, stood at a post-World War II high of 20.6 percent when Reagan took office in 1981).

All told, the poorest 40 percent of households in America went backward in income in the pre-Reagan period of 1973 to 1981 while the income of the upper 60 percent increased.

The Reagan years, 1981 to 1989, in contrast, saw real income increases and job gains for every income group, from the poorest quintile to the richest.