Quote:
Originally Posted by dechatelet
That was because Reagan had cleaned up Carter's mess.
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Perhaps you forgot that we had a president in between Reagan and Clinton, named Bush, who had a lackluster economy. But if you want to believe a fantasy that Reagan had a wonderful economy, just skip over George H. W. Bush and then claim that Clinton inherited Reagan's economy, I won't stop you.
But as long as we got sidetracked, let me address Reaganolatry. Carter presided over faster average job growth and lower unemployment than Reagan; unfortunately for Carter, his timing was bad, with vigorous growth for most of his presidency but a recession at the end.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates from 1979 to 1982 in order to bring inflation down. Carter presided over the first part of that double-dip recession, and got wrongly blamed for it; Reagan presided over the second part, and wrongly got credit for the later recovery, when the Fed relaxed interest rates.
What is interesting is that real median family income rose through Carter's term and dropped through Reagan's first term. Nonetheless, Carter was booted from office with the slogan "are you better off now than you were four years ago?" (actually yes), while Reagan won a landslide as a triumphant economic savior, which he wasn't.
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