OPINION:
President Trump is on the receiving end of many negative headlines about the economy. Mr. Trump can take it, but for the benefit of those who might be losing heart about “Trumponomics,” please allow this veteran of Reaganomics to offer reassurance. It has been worse, and it will get better.
Having worked for the 40th president in the 1980s, I’m here to say that if the 47th president sticks with pro-growth policies, as he obviously intends to, we’ll see a boom.
For this author, working in the White House from 1981 to 1983 was a great honor, but it wasn’t much fun to peruse the news. President Reagan had inherited a terrible economy from his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. So, as a corrective, he launched a plan of tax and spending cuts and deregulation.
It was the right medicine, but it was tough medicine. The stock market fell during the first two years while unemployment rose and peaked at 10.8%. The negative commentary hit a deafening crescendo.
“Reagan’s Economic Plan Courts Disaster” was the headline atop a Washington Post op-ed from February 1982. CBS News commentator Bill Moyers said in an hourlong prime-time report from May 1982, “Hunger in America is back,” and “helpless people are getting hurt.” The Reagan White House protested the broadcast’s obvious bias, but there was no appeal. Moyers was a former press secretary to a Democratic president and could do as he pleased; that was how the media cookie crumbled.
In October 1982, a New York Times reporter asked, “How could Mr. Reagan’s economic plan have been enacted in the first place?” The Times man answered, “It was a program that lacked any sort of traditional constituency in Congress or in the government, a program whose premises were challenged by conservative and liberal economists alike and that was widely characterized as a risky gamble with the nation’s future.”
In the face of this onslaught, some Republicans panicked. Rep. Marc Marks of Pennsylvania took to the House floor to denounce “a president and his cronies whose belief in Hooverism has blinded them to the wretchedness and to the suffering they are inflicting.”
One bright spot in those bleak days was the launching of The Washington Times on May 17, 1982. Even so, the establishment media and the Democrats had a monopoly, and they did their best to turn “Reaganomics” into a dirty word.
The Republicans got clobbered in the 1982 midterm elections, and the news in early 1983 wasn’t any better. A Gallup poll released in January showed Reagan losing to likely Democratic challenger Walter Mondale by 12 percentage points. A few days later, a New York Times editorial declared, “The stench of failure hangs over Ronald Reagan’s White House. The people know it, judging by the opinion polls. Corporate titans know it and whisper disenchantment with a fellow conservative.”
That was a standard media tactic: Even conservatives know Reagan is wrong.
Then, much to the consternation of the all-knowing Times, the economy turned around, just as Reagan said it would. The gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, grew by nearly 8% in 1983 and 5.5% in 1984. The always-wry Reagan quipped, “The best sign that our economic program is working is that they don’t call it ‘Reaganomics’ anymore.” By then, it was a little more fun for me to consume news, although the big media never did ease up on Reagan; fortunately, he, too, had a thick skin.
In November 1984, Reagan buried Mondale in a landslide. In that decade, the world realized capitalism was winning while communism and its variants were losing. A richer America and a better world, thanks to Reaganomics.
So now to today. Mr. Trump is making headlines with market-disrupting trade disputes, but the real story is the productive surge in the heartland.
Mr. Trump, like Reagan before him, is pushing for lower taxes, less spending and deregulation. He is making “big, beautiful” deals for trade and inbound investment worldwide. He has freed artificial intelligence, and everything else, from “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Perhaps most profoundly, Team Trump speaks of “energy dominance” and “abundance” while easing up on environmental regulations, including ending the “net zero” zealotry that has strangled Europe. Greater energy, of course, means lower prices.
In the meantime, as the economy shifts from globalism to producerism, there will be some adjustments. Stock markets have been priced according to international arbitrage, and so a correction will come as Americans start making more of their own stuff.
Yet as we know, a rising tide lifts all boats. An epic, Reaganesque boom is coming.
• James P. Pinkerton worked in the White House domestic policy offices of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is a co-chair of the Tax Cut Victory Alliance.
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