He came in following Carter getting us into the worst recession since the Great Depression, and actually turned things around by cutting taxes and doing everything right.

That 17.1% true unemployment figure high in 1982 proves it. We hit bottom in 1983 and then went up. So now, the true unemployment rate is higher–either 17.5% and guaranteed to get worse next month, or as high as 21.4% if you figure it honestly, and the Obama administration, Pelosi and Reid are doing everything wrong, duplicating what the Democrats did back in the ’30’s on a more massive scale.

It didn’t work then. It won’t work now. And things are going to get worse.

the GOP lost massive seats due to the recession that Reagan inherited but that had not been solved yet.

Same in 2010 for ObamaDems.

The difference is that Reagan had put policies in place to encourage investment and job formation. Obama’s policies and the dems since 2007 are hostile to wealth creation of any kind.

no harm here. BTW, becker Reagan was on the job for a year and 10+ when he got to December 1982.

but Reagan fixed it.

nt

And if he notices it, he’ll likely bite my fingers off.

I can hardley get into any members diaries, I am immediately thrown out, with the message that “This page cannot be displayed” as I am looking at the diary in the background. I have no problems at all whatsoever on any other site I visit. And, I have no problem at all with getting into the front page diaries. What’s up?

on this site it’s always either 500 errors or “Cannot Display the Page” There are two ads that completely hang up my IE8; the one with the growing noses and the one about the telephone tea party. If either of those are displayed, only the left side of the page displays; no Diaries, Red Hot, or comments. Just have to keep refreshing the page until another ad is displaying and then the whole page will load.

And let me add two “yeps”…

One, Reagan fixed it.
Two, it’s gonna be a whole lot worse before it gets better.

one that was already pretty well developed when he took office in early ‘77. He gets plenty of blame for handling the economy and foreign affairs ineptly, but he didn’t start the problem; that’s all on President Nixon and a Democrat Congress’ heads - with a lot of help from our Soviet friends.

The US stood idly by when Ghadaffi, then a Soviet client, nationalized the Libyan oil fields, in ‘70 I think. The other Soviet client, Iraq followed suit, followed by the more Westward leaning Saudi Arabia and the emirates. At that point OPEC became something much more than social club or trade association. It seems lost to memory that these now rich and powerful Arab states and leaders had done little or nothing to develop the oil; they had just accepted their baksheesh and the Western oil companies fronted all the skill and money to develope the provinces, the biggie being AARAMCO, a joint venture of, principally BP and Exxon. With the nationalization, the World price of oil began to rise inexorably. The US was already fighting inflation because of the “guns and butter” policy in financing Vietnam. Increases in commodity prices led by oil aggravated the inflation to the point where Nixon instituted wage and price controls in ‘71 or ‘72. I’m working from memory so some of this may be a little off but the bright colors and broad strokes are right.

The Arab States felt real power in the ‘73 War iwth Israel but with, and the Arabs thought because of, US intervention with weapons for Israel, the Arabs ultimately were defeated. The Arabs did no go gently. Since they now controlled all the oil from the Middle East, they put an embargo on oil exports to The West. The West’s economic paradigm was based on oil in the $5-8/bbl. range and even reaching that price paradigm had caused considerable inflation as pre-nationalization ME oil had been under $2/bbl. The TransAlaska Pipeline, at the time the largest and most expensive construction project in history, was based on economic viability with oil at $7.50/bbl., then very expensive oil when the project was approved in ‘71. With the Arab Oil Embargo of ‘74, the price of oil, if available at all, simply skyrocketed, ultimately reaching the mid - $30s/bbl. and the economy tanked as it did. About the only thing good that can be said for Carter’s tenure is that he didn’t much interfere with constrution of the TAPS though his Greenie friends certainly did and the price of the TAPS skyrocketed as well. By the time the environmentalists were through what had been projected to be about a billion dollar project had become an $8 billion dollar project, but by ‘80, it was producing almost 25% of America’s oil. At the same time, BP, then an arm of the British Governent as well as Norway were bringing on the elephant field in the North Sea. By ‘81, the dramatic increases in oil production combined with more resolute economic and foreign policy from both President Reagan and PM Thatcher first stabliized the price of oil and allowed the Western economies to catch up with that price and establish a new price paradigm.

The fields in Alaska and the North Sea went into production with the highest uplift rates of any major fields in the World. Uplift rate is production as a percentage of proven reserves. Throwing all that oil on the market combined with rational economic policies in both the US and GB broke the OPEC monopoly and the price of oil crashed in ‘86, flirting with $10/bbl. and even less. A sound dollar, conservative tax policy, and a low, stable oil price all contributed to starting a boom that lasted from the mid-eighties until last September with only the minor and mostly media induced early ’90s recession that helped elect WJC who is given all the credit for things he had little to do with.

So, Carter had both bad policies and bad luck and even worse luck as the result of his own bad policies. Reagan had both good policies and good luck as did GHWB until the “recession.” WJC would have had bad policies which would have led to bad luck but he overplayed his hand in ‘92-93 and lost control of the Congress causing him to have to accommodate Republican policies. The economy was robust enough to weather the bursting of the tech bubble and GWB and a Repubican Congress kept the economy rollicking despite the Democrats’ best efforts to talk the economy down. The Dem/Media propaganda war and weariness with real wars brought a Democrat Congress in ‘06 and something, I think something really bad, brought first skyrocketing oil prices in ‘07-’08 and an economic crisis and a communist takeover in late ‘08.

but rather vice versa. As I set out, there was already inflation in the US economy because of overspending and borrowing for both Vietnam and The Great Society. The declining value of the dollar was a factor in the movement from the $2/bbl. paradigm towards the $8/bbl. paradigm on which the TAPS was predicated. After nationalization there was not a free market in a vital commodity, oil. You had a cartel willfully increasing the price of that vital commidity because they could and creating a shortage because they could. Then, as you describe, more and more money going to oil caused less and less to be available for other things. Likewise, those who could did what they could to drive up their earnings so they could afford more things. Combine that with some horrendous policy decision and you got both a recession and inflation at the same time, the stagflation phenomenon and the “misery index.”