How Ronald Reagan zapped a recession with massive government spending [View all]

[MiniMe]

No one is more associated with the conservative cause of small government than Ronald Reagan.

He entered office in 1981 insisting that government deficits were too high, that taxes had to be cut, that spending had to shrink. His inaugural address declared "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." His 1988 farewell address reiterated that "man is not free unless government is limited." Name-checking Reagan and these commitments has pretty much been an entry requirement for politicians into the GOP ever since.

But as people have noted over the years, there's a tension between Reagan's rhetoric and what actually went down between his inaugural and farewell speeches. Both the national debt and the size of the federally employed workforce rose during Reagan's tenure. Government spending grew as a share of the economy, then returned to exactly where it was when Reagan started.

But what's most interesting about this contradiction is that, in all likelihood, Reagan's failure to deliver on his own small government rhetoric is a big part of why the famed Reagan economic boom happened.

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http://www.theweek.com/articles/642128/how-ronald-reagan-zapped-recession-massive-government-spending


As all on DU have known, the Reagan myth is just that, a total myth.