Mr. Perfect wrote:
Total debt increase under Reagan= 1.9 trillion
Total debt increase under W Bush= 4 trillion
Total debt increase under obama= 10 trillion by end of term, more than all Presidents previous combined. "Spending our way out of bankruptcy". Financial genius Joe Biden. Remember obama said 4 trillion was unpatriotic.
What does this have to do with Reagan-era policies, their impact on the economy then, and their usefulness now? Nothing. The national debt is not yet having any meaningful impact on the US economy and investment therein. Interest rates are at historic lows globally. There is no inflation. The United States remains the preferred destination for foreign and domestic investment dollars by a wide margin.
Will the debt have an impact down the road? Probably. When? No one knows for sure, but not in the near term given the relatively inferior shape of the rest of the world.
If anything, the US is awash with access to cheap money to finance new ventures as evidenced by the frothy technology sector and the booming oil/natural gas sector. A
reduction in the deficit and the debt are not pertinent to this particular discussion because these things did not happen under Reagan, either.
A 3% drop resulting from the worst recession since the 1940's, just as the baby boomers head toward retirement. What inferences can be drawn from this regarding Reagan-style policies (whatever those are, because you've sure failed to demonstrate a grasp of the 1980's economy) will have to be spelled out to me. Reagan didn't face this sort of a situation. And given the nature of business cycles, it will take years for this to correct itself even if all the "right" steps are taken.
Here's the labor force participation rate in better context:
- latest_numbers_LNS11300000_1970_2014_all_period_M08_data.gif (5.85 KiB) Viewed 1288 times
I got this directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Why did you truncate your plot? Between January 1976 and 1980, the participation rate grew by 2.7%. Between 1980 and 1990, it grew by 2.8%. By your logic, Carter puts Reagan to shame and the 1970's were the best of times in Amerca. And note the very clear inflection point during the 1990's, well before W. and Obama. Do you understand why this happened and why the upward trend in labor force participation peaked?
Now that I've
demolished your argument, let's stick to the point.
The number and share of people out of work for more than six months, the so-called long-term unemployed, remain at historically high levels.
Of the 3 million long-term jobless today, about one-third have been unemployed for more than two years, Labor Department data show. A small minority — roughly 100,000 Americans like Perry — have been actively looking for at least five years.
They might be called the super long-term unemployed. While others have quit looking, taken early retirement or entered disability rolls, these workers have pressed on year after year despite the increasingly long odds of finding a new job.
All true but none of it reinforces your point. I posted a very detailed and purely factual analysis of the 1980's economy showing that there was nothing remarkable about that one-trick pony. The 1980's were an era of wage stagnation, low-skill retail and food industry job growth, and a one-time expansion in trade and wholesale driven by
importing technology from Japan and cheap goods from elsewhere.
The 1980's were the era of strip malls, shopping malls, and retail stores: KMart, Walmart, Shopco, Mervyn's, Circuit City, Marshall's, Ross, Sears, etc., etc., etc. Many of these are now defunct because the factory-to-consumer pipeline has been decimated by the Internet, which continues to
thrive in the United States.
