This book contains extensive analysis and commentary on three Essays written many years ago by Garet Garrett. The three related Essays were eventually published together as a book in 1953 by Caxton Press under the title of, The People’s Pottage. It may be one of the more insightful series of political commentaries in modern history. When reading, one quickly realizes that President Obama is the political twin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The number of other present-day applications that are presented herein is startling!
COPYBOOK HEADINGS PRODUCTION, LLC
P.O. Box 231
Huston, ID 83630
AgendaDocumentary.com
The Revolution Is!
The People’s Pottage - Revisited
Copyright 2015 by James C. Bowers
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or by any information storage without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
The People’s Pottage is reprinted with permission of Caxton Press, Caldwell, Idaho
International Standard Book Number: 9781483552194
eISBN: 9781483560434
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 – The Revolution Was (Interspersed commentary)
CHAPTER 2 – Ex America (Interspersed commentary)
CHAPTER 3 – The Rise of Empire (Interspersed commentary)
CHAPTER 4 – A Counter Revolution to Recapture America
CHAPTER 5 – A True Revolutionary
EPILOGUE
Ordering Information
INTRODUCTION
This book is an analysis of an impressive series of three Essays written over a period of years from 1938 to 1952 by Garet Garrett. The three were eventually published together in 1953 by Caxton Press under the title of, The People’s Pottage. It may be one of the more insightful series of political commentaries in modern history. It is important to understand that Mr. Garrett was not someone on the fringe, making “far out” unfounded political charges and observations. Rather he was a well-known, highly respected journalist at the time. Because of his incredible pronouncements, so far ahead of his time, a short biography is given below to document his outstanding career and credibility:
Garet Garrett was born February 19, 1878 in Illinois and grew up on a farm near Burlington, Iowa. He left home as a teenager, finding work as a printer’s helper in Cleveland. In 1898, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he covered the administration of William McKinley as a newspaper reporter. In 1900, he moved to New York City, where he became a financial reporter. By 1910, he had become a financial columnist for the New York Evening Post. In 1913, he became editor of The New York Times Annalist, a financial weekly and in 1915 he joined the editorial council of the New York Times. In 1916, at 38, he became the executive editor of the New York Tribune.
In 1922, he became the principal writer on economic issues for the Saturday Evening Post, a position he held until 1942. From 1944 to 1950 he edited American Affairs, the magazine of The Conference Board. In his career, Garrett was a confidant of Bernard Baruch and Herbert Hoover, among other prominent people.
Garrett wrote 13 books. His most-read work is The People’s Pottage, which consists of three Essays: The Revolution Was, which portrays the New Deal as a “revolution within the form” that undermined the American republic, Ex America charts the decline in America’s individualist values from 1900 to 1950 and The Rise of Empire which argues that America has become too much of an imperial state, trying to solve all of the world’s problems.
The organizational structure I am using for this book is quite unusual and is important for the reader to understand. The first of the three Essays by Mr. Garrett, The Revolution Was (written in 1938), is the most thought provoking of the three Essays. It also is fascinating reading when one mentally transposes President Obama’s name with that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) throughout this first Essay. I have added comments, updates, analysis and present day applications throughout all of his three Essays. My added material is highlighted in bold print, so it is easy to identify my words from Mr. Garrett’s. In addition, any supplemental material by other authors that I insert from time to time is also in bold print, but in addition is italicized.
Mr. Garrett’s thesis in 1938 was that the revolution that Obama would years later forecast he was going to bring to America (“fundamentally transform us”) - had already happened - 70 years earlier! Mr. Garrett makes a very strong case for his conclusions. Obviously a lot to ponder and digest!
My title, The Revolution Is, comes from my premise that “it’s not quite over.” Mr. Garrett states his case very effectively that, The Revolution Was - that is, it’s all over … it’s already happened. I try to show that the Revolution is still ongoing and we still have a chance to reverse this tide and reclaim America. I include an entire Chapter Four on how we can accomplish that.
CHAPTER ONE
[The added comments by James C. Bowers in 2015 are put in bold type for easy identification.]
The Revolution Was
1938
There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the night of the depression, singing songs to freedom.
There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, “Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.” These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen when, “one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.” Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme - charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.
Sound familiar? With so many accusing Obama and his Administration of being incompetent! Maybe they’re not! Maybe they know exactly what they are doing. Barack Obama’s background makes that concern realistic, since his confidants, his mentors, his father and mother, his teachers, his idols - everyone he ever spent time with his entire life had a deeply leftist worldview!!
But it could not be so embarrassed and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme. It took off from a revolutionary base. The design was European. Regarded from the point of view of revolutionary technique, it made perfect sense. Its meaning was revolutionary and it had no other. For what it meant to do it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake. The test came in the first one hundred days.
Consider that Obama was more open in his true intentions than Roosevelt. By now our population has become so brainwashed, uniformed and apathetic, Obama was comfortable openly proclaiming that he wanted to, “fundamentally transform America.” He also knew that today’s mainstream media would cover for him no matter what he said or did. Liberal bias in the media has been documented and openly acknowledged by both sides for decades, but with Obama it has reached an unprecedented level - as some liberals have belatedly acknowledged! Did most of us really want to fundamentally transform the greatest country in the history of the world? Mr. Garrett felt that after only two terms, Roosevelt had already accomplished that goal. If not, we gave Obama two terms to try and finish the job! Mark Levin, the constitutional lawyer and author of several best-selling books, said on his radio talk show of November 19, 2014 that President Obama has completed a “silent coup” that does complete the job. He feels that we are now living in a “post-Constitutional” period in our country. He does believe that we can recapture our country, but the situation is dire. [Chapter FOUR of this book will offer specific suggestion on how to recover.]
No matter how carefully a revolution may have been planned there is bound to be a crucial time that comes when the actual seizure of power is taking place. In this case certain steps were necessary. They were difficult and daring steps. But more than that, they had to be taken in a certain sequence, with forethought and precision of timing. One out of place might have been fatal. What happened was that one followed another in exactly the right order, not one out of time or out of place. Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technique; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse. The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion, a certain end held constantly in view, was relentlessly pursued. The “end” held constantly in view was power!
A new documentary movie, AGENDA 2: Master’s of Deceit, exposes the fact that this exact strategy is now being used to finish what the New Deal started. [See: AgendaDocumentary.com, for info on this new film and related products.] Many people today, due to what they have been taught in school, believe that Roosevelt delivered us from the Great Depression. People at that time were so desperate that they clung to every word FDR spoke in his cleverly orchestrated radio Fireside Chats. As with Obama, even though things were not improving after his first term, people believed in Roosevelt and re-elected him four times because he, “really cared.” However, the facts on FDR’s failure are now easy to document. Even at that time, his own Secretary of Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, bluntly acknowledged that fact when he stated, “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” He concluded, “I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … And an enormous debt to boot!”
In a revolutionary situation mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand. As deLawd said in The Green Pastures, that when you have passed a miracle you have to pass another one to take care of it, so it was with the New Deal. Every miracle it passed, whether it went right or wrong, had one result: Executive power over the social and economic life of the nation was increased. Draw a curve to represent the rise of executive power and look there for the mistakes. You will not find them. The curve is consistent. At the end of the first year, in his annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1934, President Roosevelt said: “It is to the eternal credit of the American people that this tremendous readjustment of our national life is being accomplished peacefully.” Peacefully if possible — of course.
As mentioned earlier, during his election campaign, President Obama repeatedly talked about, “fundamentally changing America.” Many people took that in a good way, which is one reason he was elected. For me it was a little eerie. It brought back to my mind an incident that my father had told me about when I was only a young man and at that time I did not realize its significance. I have never heard or read anything about this anywhere since. My Dad had been an Army Officer during WWI. At the time this incident occurred in the late 1930’s, Dad was a civilian, managing the airport at South Bend, Indiana. Thirty years later in the 1960’s is when my Dad told me about the time he was unexpectedly visited by the Army Chief of Staff. In apparently a very private meeting at his airport, he was told that the top military brass had gotten together and decided that if President Roosevelt used the depression, presently going on in the country, as an excuse to declare martial law in order to establish a dictatorship, the top military people had agreed among themselves that they had made an unprecedented decision to ignore Roosevelt’s orders and come out on “the side of the people.” I never asked for details. I didn’t know or understand enough to ask. I don’t know if the General came to him because my Dad was the manager of an airport or because he had been an Army officer, still in the Reserves. I also didn’t ask if he knew how many others were informed. (It had to be quite a few.) My Dad was never a “political” person. This conversation just came up one time and was never discussed again. It was only much, much later, after I had become more informed by reading various books that discussed how many of Roosevelt’s leftist confidents had urged him to “make the move” that I then realized the significance of what my Father had said and how close we had come to a “take-over” from within - way back then! That same fear was later revisited when I heard Obama’s Chief of Staff, Ron Emanuel, talk about, “never letting a crisis go to waste.” Déjà vu!
But the revolutionary historian will go much further. Writing at some distance in time he will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technique of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signs. This was the American people’s first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin. Until it was too late, few understood Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association, saying: “Is there any labor leader, any businessman, any lawyer or any other citizen of America so blind that he cannot see that this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law… so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within the Constitution and within the forms of law?”
For a significant illustration of what has happened to words — of the double meaning that inhabits them — put in contrast what the New Deal means when it speaks of preserving the American system of free private enterprise and what American business means when it speaks of defending it. To the New Deal these words — the American system of free private enterprise — stand for a conquered province. To the businessman the same words stand for a world that is in danger and may have to be defended. The New Deal is right. Business is wrong! You do not defend a world that is already lost. When was it lost? That one cannot say precisely. It is a point for the revolutionary historian to ponder. We know only that it was surrendered peacefully, without a struggle, almost unawares. There was no day, no hour, no celebration of the event — and yet definitely, the ultimate power of initiative did pass from the hands of private enterprise to government. There it is and there it will remain until, if ever, it shall be reconquered. Certainly government will never surrenders without a struggle. To the revolutionary mind the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Genghis Khan’s first view of China — so rich, so soft, so unaware. No politically adult people could ever have been so little conscious of revolution. There was here no revolutionary tradition, as in Europe, but in place of it the strongest tradition of subject government that had ever been evolved — that is, government subject to the will of the people, not its people but the people. Why should anyone fear government?
In the naive American mind the word revolution had never grown up. The meaning of it had not changed since horse-and-buggy days, when Oliver Wendell Holmes said: “Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.” It called up scenes from Carlyle and Victor Hugo, or it meant killing the Czar with a bomb, as he may have deserved for oppressing his people. Definitely, it meant the overthrow of government by force; and nothing like that could happen here. We had passed a law against it. Well, certainly nothing like that was going to happen here. That it probably could not happen, and that everybody was so sure it couldn’t made everything easier for what did happen.
To get an overview of just how effective President Obama has been in transforming America, I wrote a Letter to the Editor which summarizes the situation as far back as 2010:
January 24, 2010
St. Petersburg Times
Editor:
It was refreshing to read the candor in your lead editorial of January 24th concerning President Obama’s, “Productive Two Years.” Most knowledgeable liberals and liberal organizations have been very quiet on this subject, while the less informed liberal groups have been howling over President Obama “compromising” with the Republicans on the modest tax cut agreement and not closing Guantanamo. As I shall attempt to summarize, President Obama has already accomplished more “fundamental change” (as he promised) in two years than FDR did in four terms.
The complaining on both sides has provided the “cover” needed for Obama to almost complete his massive goal. During his brief time, the government has taken at least partial control of:
1) The Auto Industry [GM & Chrysler].
2) The Financial Industry all of it.
3) The Entire Healthcare Industry.
4) The Housing Industry.
5) The Student Loan Program.
6) The Food Supply.
In addition, this Administration has prompted basic changes to our American culture and our way of life as seen by:
7) The ability to control all businesses by allowing the EPA edicts (that strangle business) to stand as law, without any Congressional input, plus thousands of pages pf new regulations.
8) The ability to control the Internet by FCC edicts, not Congressional actions.
9) Allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the Armed Forces, breaking over 200 years of tradition.
10) On the horizon will be the application of the so-called Fairness Doctrine, to undermine Fox News and all of Talk Radio.
The Federal Government has always had the constitutional authority to control the military, which is a large part of our budget. They have always had indirect control of our money supply (See Edward Griffin’s book and YouTube speech on the Federal Reserve System), interest rates and inflation - which affects everything. In addition, the Federal Government has indirect control over the price of oil and gas. Add to all of this is the unbelievable fact that here in the land of private property, the state and federal governments own 40% of all of our land! Other than land for buildings and Parks, why should they own any?
After two years of Obama, the obvious question now is: What’s left? The answer is: Almost nothing! Think about that. The Federal Government now has almost total control over every aspect of our lives and will soon be able to silence all of the voices of information or opposition.
Each of the ten items listed above have been publicized. The problem is most Americans don’t correlate the news items as they develop. Many get upset in a certain area, but by the time the next item comes along, they don’t relate it to the last one - to see the overall picture of the total transformation taking place. Most are too busy with their jobs or family and their own lives.
Dr. James C. Bowers
Revolution in modern times is no longer an uncouth business. The ancient demagogic art, like every other art, has, as we say, advanced. It has become in fact science — the science of political dynamics. And your scientific revolutionary in spectacles regards force in a cold, impartial manner. It may or may not be necessary. If not, so much the better; to employ it wantonly, or for the love of it, when it is not necessary, is vulgar, unintelligent and wasteful. Destruction is not the aim. The more you destroy the less there is to take over. Always the single end in view is a transfer of power!
Outside of the Communist party and its aurora of radical intellectuals, few Americans seemed to know that revolution had become a department of knowledge, with a philosophy and a doctorate of its own, a language, a great body of experimental data, schools of method, textbooks, and manuals — and this was revolution regarded not as an act of heroic redress in a particular situation, but revolution as a means to power in the abstract case. There was a prodigious literature of revolutionary thought concealed only by the respectability of its dress. Americans generally associated dangerous doctrine with bad printing, rude grammar, and stealthy distribution. Here was revolutionary doctrine in well printed and well written books, alongside of best sellers at your bookstore or in competition with detectives on your news dealer’s counter. As such it was all probably harmless, or it was about something that could happen in Europe, not here. A little communism on the newsstand like that might be good for us, in fact, regarded as a twinge of pain in a robust, somewhat reckless social body. One ought to read it, perhaps, just to know. But one had tried, and what dreary stuff it had turned out to be!
To the revolutionary this same dreary stuff was the most exciting reading in the world. It was knowledge that gave him a sense of power. One who mastered the subject to the point of excellence could be fairly sure of a livelihood by teaching and writing, that is, by imparting it to others, and meanwhile dream of passing at a single leap from this mean obscurity to the prestige of one who assists in the manipulation of great happenings; while one who mastered it to the point of genius — that one might dream of becoming himself the next Lenin.
This is what many learn in our colleges and universities. Speak the “party line” and a job in our schools is almost guaranteed and if you actually believe it, all the better; you will advance far! And once in the school system, speaking and writing the “party line” ensures funding which leads to publishing research papers, necessary to advance in college academic circles.
A society so largely founded on material success and the rewards of individualism in a system of free competitive enterprise would be liable to underestimate both the intellectual content of the revolutionary thesis and the quality of the revolutionary mind that was evolving in a disaffected and envious academic world. At any rate, this society did, and from the revolutionary point of view that was one of the peculiar felicities — of the American opportunity. The revolutionary mind that did at length evolve was one of really superior intelligence, clothed with academic dignity, always sure of itself, supercilious and at ease in all circumstances. To entertain it became fashionable. You might encounter it anywhere, and nowhere more amusingly than at a banker’s dinner table discussing the banker’s trade in a manner sometimes very embarrassing to the banker. Which of these brilliant young men in spectacles was of the cult and which was of the cabal — if there were a cabal — one never knew. Indeed, it was possible that they were not sure of it among themselves, a time having come when some were only playing with the thought of extremes while others were in deadly earnest, all making the same sounds. This was the beginning of mask and guise.
The scientific study of revolution included of course analysis of opportunity. First and always the master of revolutionary technic is an opportunist. He must know opportunity when he sees it in the becoming; he must know how to stalk it, how to let it ripen, how to adapt his means to the realities. The basic ingredients of opportunity are few; nearly always it is how they are mixed that matters. But the one indispensable ingredient is economic distress, and if there is enough of that the mixture will take care of itself. The Great Depression as it developed here was such an opportunity as might have been made to order. The economic distress was relative, which is to say that at the worst of it living in this country was better than living almost anywhere else in the world. The pain, nevertheless, was very acute; and much worse than any actual hurt was a nameless fear, a kind of active despair, that assumed the proportions of a national psychosis. Seizures of that kind were not unknown in American history. Indeed, they were characteristic of the American temperament. But never before had there been one so hard and never before had there been the danger that a revolutionary elite would be waiting to take advantage of it.
This revolutionary elite was nothing you could define as a party. It had no name, no habitat and no rigid line. The only party was the Communist Party, and it was included, but its attack was too obvious and its proletarianism too crude, and moreover, it was under the stigma of not belonging. Nobody could say that about the elite. They did belong, it was eminently respectable, and it knew the American scene. What it represented was a quantity of bitter intellectual radicalism infiltrated from the top downward as a doctorhood of professors, writers, critics, analysts, advisers, administrators, directors of research, and so on — a prepared revolutionary intelligence in spectacles. There was no plan to begin with. But there was a shibboleth that united them all: “Capitalism is finished.” There was one idea in which all differences could be resolved, namely, the idea of a transfer of power. For that a united front; after that, anything. And the wine of communion was a passion to play upon history with a scientific revolutionary technique.
The prestige of the elite was natural for many reasons; but it rested also upon one practical consideration. When the opportunity came a Gracchus would be needed. The elite could produce one.
And they did!! First FDR and later to finish the job they produced Obama out of nowhere I might add! Unqualified, untested, inexperienced and unvetted! Can you believe someone so totally unprepared could have ever been elected, to even as a city council member of a small town? Some believe that Obama being elected was impossible. Therefore they conclude it was God’s judgment, long overdue. I would certainly agree that the way our country has strayed from our moral foundation and basic natural law has been considerable. Just think of one area - that of abortion. We have murdered almost 60,000,000 babies in their mother’s womb since Roe v. Wade. And that is just one area of our increasing decadence.
Now given — (1) the opportunity, (2) a country whose fabulous wealth was in the modern forms — dynamic, functional, non-portable, (3) a people so politically naive as to have actually passed a law against any attempt to overthrow their government by force — and, (4) the intention to bring about what Aristotle called a revolution in the state, within the frame of existing law — then from the point of view of scientific revolutionary technique what would the problems be? They set themselves down in sequence as follows: The first, naturally, would be to capture the seat of government. The second would be to seize economic power. The third would be to mobilize by propaganda the forces of hatred.
Think of the endless times Obama, the media and his other cohorts have talked about the Republicans’ war on women, racism, oppression of the poor, class warfare, etc. All distortions, doing everything to exploit the forces of hatred. Divide and conquer.
The fourth would be to reconcile and then attach to the revolution the two great classes whose adherence is indispensable but whose interests are economically antagonistic, namely, the industrial wage earners and the farmers, called in Europe workers and peasants.
The farming sector is no longer a large voting bloc in America. Going from over 20% in 1930 to around 2% today. As a voting bloc, the farmers have been replaced by those on welfare or other government assistance. Almost 50% now. FDR had to work (bribe) to get a portion of the farmers to vote for him; however, with those on welfare, Obama receives almost all of their votes as long as he keeps the checks coming and they can be dragged to the polls. He even had the Government place ads offering food stamps to nearly one and all, including illegal immigrants.
The fifth would be what to do with business — whether to liquidate or shackle it? (These five would have a certain imperative order in time and require immediate decisions because they belong to the program of conquest. That would not be the end. What would then ensue? A program of consolidation. Under that head the problems continue.)
The sixth, in Burckhardt’s devastating phrase, would be “the domestication of individuality” by any means that would make the individual more dependent upon government. The seventh would be the systematic reduction of all forms of rival authority. The eighth would be to sustain popular faith in an unlimited public debt, for if that faith should break the government would be unable to borrow, if it could not borrow it could not spend, and the revolution must be able to borrow and spend the wealth of the rich or else it will be bankrupt. The ninth would be to make the government itself the great capitalist and enterpriser, so that the ultimate power in initiative would pass from the hands of private enterprise to the all-powerful state.
As when our government “bailed out” and took control of one of the largest and certainly most recognized American company in the world General Motors. If he had not done this, GM would have been able to declare bankruptcy, which would have allowed them to reorganize and rid themselves of all of the crippling, unsustainable labor agreements they had been forced to accept over the years. With more efficiency and therefore more profits, they not only would have been able to keep their present workers, but undoubtedly added more. Also, in the bailout the government paid off all of the deficits the union pensions had accumulated. FORD refused to accept the government money. This gave GM a large financial advantage over FORD who had to cover their own costs and pensions. When FORD tried to use the fact that they had not accepted taxpayers’ money in a TV Ad, it was very embarrassing to Obama. I saw the Ad one time and then it disappeared. I can only imagine the CEO of FORD got a call from the White House. Obama didn’t want anyone competing with his new toy a car company.
Each one of these problems would have two sides, one the obverse and one the reverse, like a coin. One side only would represent the revolutionary intention. The other side in each case would represent Recovery — and that was the side the New Deal constantly held up to view. Nearly everything it did was in the name of Recovery. But in no case was it true that for the ends of economic recovery alone one solution or one course and one only was feasible. In each case there was an alternative and therefore a choice to make. What we shall see is that in every case the choice was one that could not fail:
(a) To ratify the authority and power of executive government - its power, that is, to rule by decrees with rules and regulations of its own making;
Many will recall when Obama openly proclaimed in 2014 he didn’t need Congress, because he had a “phone and a pen!” He immediately proved that by personally changing our immigration laws. Later he again broke our existing laws when he freed five leading Muslim Terrorist prisoners in exchange for a U.S. Army deserter without consulting Congress - as was required by law. Only two example of many!!
(b) To strengthen its hold upon the economic life of the nation; (c) To extend its power over the individual; (d) To degrade the parliamentary principle; (e) To impair the great American tradition of an independent, Constitutional judicial power; (f) To weaken all other powers — the power of private enterprise, the power of private finance, the power of state and local government; (g) To exalt the leader principle.
There was endless controversy as to whether the acts of the New Deal did actually move recovery or retard it, and nothing final could ever come of that bitter debate because it is forever impossible to prove what might have happened in place of what did.
Mr. Garrett wrote this Essay many years ago, but History has since given us a pretty good idea of what, “might have happened.” In 1980 when Ronald Reagan went into office after the disastrous Jimmy Carter years, the economy was also in similar terrible shape - across the board! However, in every sphere of economic strategy Reagan did the opposite of what Roosevelt and later Obama did. It is very instructive to see that Reagan’s approach started the longest economic boom in American history. World War II got us out of FDR’s economic disaster, but Obama never has.
Reagan’s record has been lost to later generations because of media bias. It is important to know the facts, so that future politicians will know what actually works. An excellent summary of this very important topic was recently documented by David Limbaugh in a syndicated column and is reprinted below:
Ever since Reagan’s two terms in office, Democrats have been trying to recast those years of remarkable peacetime growth, without inflation, as a time of abject greed — when the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. But the facts have never corroborated their propaganda. To really understand Reagan’s record — and thus mainstream conservatism still today — you must remember just how bleak things were during the Carter years. At the end of Jimmy Carter’s term, unemployment was 7.4 percent, and galloping toward double digits; inflation was already in double digits; and interest rates were a staggering 21.5 percent. There was no end in sight.
Indeed, I remember the general malaise that gripped the nation at that time — the attitude of despair, fatalism, and resignation. America’s best years, according to Carter’s apologists, were behind her, and it wasn’t his fault that things were so abysmally bleak. Reagan, against all naysayers, promised that proper policies could unleash the sleeping economic giant again; that we could return to sustained, robust growth and prosperity. Once elected, despite strong opposition from Democrats in Congress, he fulfilled his promise. Reagan inherited a steep recession but, unlike President Obama today, did not keep using it as an excuse well into his presidency. Reagan didn’t need excuses, because his policies began to produce results very quickly. Reagan had pushed for a 30 percent across-the-board cut in marginal income tax rates, but Democrats in Congress forced a reduction to 25 percent and delayed its implementation. Once the bill passed and kicked in, the results were dramatic.
Along with Reagan’s policy of deregulation, his tax cuts produced an economic boom that continued for almost eight full years — from November 1982 to July 1990 — with not a scintilla of a recession. Reagan’s policies led to the largest period of economic growth to date in the history of the nation. The economy was nearly a third larger at the conclusion of the Reagan years than at the beginning. Real median family income grew by $4,000, as opposed to almost no growth during the Ford-Carter years.
Like Democrat President John F. Kennedy, Reagan demonstrated that reducing marginal income tax rates could increase revenues. Revenues almost doubled during the Reagan years. Even after adjusting for inflation, they increased by some 28 percent. Reaganomics also shattered the long-established economic textbook axiom that there is a trade-off between unemployment and inflation. Despite nearly 20 million new jobs, there was barely any upward pressure on prices. Though Democrats preached that under Reagan, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer — in fact the plight of all income groups improved. Not only that but upward mobility, which received its last rites under Carter, made a dramatic comeback, as a Treasury Department study revealed that 86 percent of the people in the lowest 20 percent of income in 1979 graduated into higher categories during the 1980s. More people in every income group moved up than down except — ironically — the top 1 percent of earners. Moreover, the real Reagan record puts the lie to the liberal mantra that the rich didn’t pay their fair share. In the first place, average effective income tax rates were cut more for lower-income groups than for higher-income groups. In 1991, after the Reagan cuts had been in place for almost a decade, the top 1 percent of income earners paid 25 percent of income taxes; the top 5 percent paid 43 percent; and the bottom half paid only 5 percent. How is that for fairness? Unfortunately, Reagan didn’t achieve the spending reductions he’d envisioned, though some misinformation exists here, too. Military spending constituted much of the increase — by design and by necessity after Carter’s gutting of our vital defenses. But the rate of domestic spending grew more slowly under Reagan than under his immediate predecessors and would have been reduced far more but for a recalcitrant big-spending Democrat congress.
The military spending, coupled with Reagan’s coherent peace-through-strength foreign policy, yielded immeasurable dividends, as the Soviet Union soon disintegrated. And no, my revisionist liberal friends, this was not because of a willing, enlightened Mikhail Gorbachev. President Reagan is still the model for conservative presidential aspirants — and for very good reasons that will not be erased, no matter how earnestly liberals try.
David Limbaugh © Creators Syndicate Inc.
-------------------- Now back to Mr. Garret’s writings ------------------
But a positive result is obtained if you ask: Where was the New Deal going? The answer to that question is too obvious to be debated. Every choice it made, whether it was one that moved recovery or not, was a choice unerringly true to the essential design of totalitarian government, never of course called by that name either here or anywhere else. How it worked, how the decisions were made, and how acts that were inconsistent from one point of view were consistent indeed from the other — that now is the matter to be explored, seriatim.
PROBLEM ONE: TO CAPTURE THE SEAT OF GOVERNMENT
There was here no choice of means. The use of force was not to be considered. Therefore, it had to be done by ballot. That being the case, and the factor of political discontent running very high, the single imperative was not to alarm the people. Senator Taft says that in the presidential campaign of 1932, “the New Deal was cleverly hidden behind a program of economy and state rights.”