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June 08, 2004
Reagan- Irresponsible Debt
As Lloyd Bentsen once said of the Reagan economy, ""You know, if you let me write $200 billion worth of hot checks every year, I could give you the illusion of prosperity too."
And lest anyone say, Reagan was just doing what other Presidents had done, he wasn't. In the post-WW II period-- after the debt incurred to pay for that war -- the US national debt stayed essentially flat at just under a trillion dollars in real dollars for almost thirty years.
Then Reagan came in and the debt skyrocketed:
Reagan and Bush Senior more than doubled the national debt, permanently hobbling future generations with debt payments.
And what did they accomplish with that debt that is so much better than Presidents who conducted their economic policy without stealing money from their grandchildren?
Any "boom" under Reagan (and the economy wasn't that great overall) was theft from future generations, nothing more. Al Capone had a pretty good economy for himself too, but we didn't give him a state funeral.
It is truly pathetic that conservatives, who once believed in pay-as-you-go accounting, can worship an economic policy that was nothing more than credit card spending sprees.
Posted by Nathan at June 8, 2004 09:28 AM