Ellen Wedum
Ronald Reagan is remembered as one of the most popular of America’s presidents, but his ratings during his term in office (1981-1989) were surprisingly poor. Like Barack Obama, he was plagued with a poor economy his first three years in office, and in 1983 his average rating was 45 percent.
However, he solved his money problems by a spectacular increase in the national debt, initiating a run of annual deficits that was only broken for the last two years of the Clinton administration. He set an as-yet unbroken record for both raising the ceiling on the national debt (17 times in eight years!) and the greatest percent increase in the national debt (he nearly tripled it!). Even though the House of Representatives was controlled by Democrats the entire time, there was little protest.
When the Republican-controlled Senate did balk at yet another increase in the fall of 1983, Reagan wrote this warning to Majority Leader Howard Baker:
“This country now possesses the strongest credit in the world. The full consequence of a default – or even the serious prospect of default – by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate… The risks, the costs, the disruptions, and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.”
Now here we are again, at almost the exact same length of a president’s term in office, but the Republicans are playing a much nastier game with our Democratic president than they did with Republican Ronald Reagan.
What is really annoying is that Reagan caused his own budget crisis by cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans. As a result of the 1981 and 1986 bills, the top income tax rate (on “taxable” income, that’s after highly-paid accountants have used all the loopholes they can find) was slashed from 70 percent to 28 percent. To his credit, he did try to correct for this loss of federal revenue with bills that made it tougher to evade taxes, and through “base broadening” – that is, reducing various federal tax breaks and closing tax loopholes. Republicans today won’t even let Obama get rid of loopholes!
Obama’s budget problems are due to the ongoing fallout from the banking deregulation disaster. His administration has bailed out failed banks and saved mortgages for middle class homeowners. But regardless of the reason for the budget problem, our country is facing the same kind of financial disaster now that we faced in the early 1980s.
We can survive this one too, if we support our president and have faith in our country – and if today’s Republicans are willing to be at least as fiscally responsible as President Reagan and Senator Baker.
Ellen Wedum is a retired physical chemist who has lived in Cloudcroft since 2004. For the online sources of information for this article, e-mail her at wedum59@gmail.com.