The latest Newsweek offers a guess about how a presidential administration led by Ronald Reagan would respond to today’s current fiscal challenges, foreign threats, and social controversies.
While designed as a not-so-subtle dig at those politicians and pundits who believe that calling themselves “Reagan Republicans” should suffice as setting forward policy prescriptions, Andrew Romano‘s article offers a valuable corrective to those who ignore the details of the 40th president’s record.
Romano’s guesswork about a “Reaganesque” response to today’s issues is open to dispute, but he does offer some interesting suggestions. One of them involves the federal deficit:
[A] 21st-century Reagan would free himself up to finish a bit of business that his predecessor never got around to: reducing the federal deficit. In the 1980 campaign, Reagan pledged to do three things if elected: lower taxes, win the Cold War, and curb government spending. But in his haste to achieve the first two goals, he abandoned the third. On his watch, federal employment grew by more than 60,000 (in contrast, government payrolls shrank by 373,000 during Clinton?s presidency). The gap between the amount of money the federal government took in and the amount it spent nearly tripled. The national debt soared from $700 billion to $3 trillion. And the United States was transformed from the world?s largest international creditor to its largest debtor.
Back then, Reagan avoided the tough decisions required to reduce the deficit; he was more concerned with confronting the Soviets and cutting taxes. But now that the Cold War is over and the top marginal tax rate is half of what it was in 1980, a real Reaganite no longer has any excuse to duck the country?s fiscal dilemma. In 2009, the Obama administration borrowed nearly 10 percent of GDP; this year the number will inch even higher. Even after the deficits decline in 2012, according to the Congressional Budget Office, they will still be higher than all but two of the shortfalls tallied under Reagan. As the bills for Social Security and Medicare come due?and voters, especially those on the right, demand action?Republicans have the opportunity to fulfill Reagan?s last, unkept promise by pushing for the kind of cuts (entitlement reform and defense rather than inconsequential ?waste and fraud?) that he was never able to make.
To get a better sense of what Reagan actually did, and thus more insight about what he would do in office today, you might enjoy Steven Hayward‘s The Age of Reagan. Hayward’s October 2009 presentation to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society included some comments about Reagan’s unfinished work on cutting government spending.
