Brain-Jockey

Reagan Bytes: Time’s Up–Words for Today on the Economy

Written by Audrie Zettick on February 25, 2009

I’m speaking to you tonight to give you a report on the state of our Nation’s economy. I regret to say that we’re in the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.

Words from President Barack Obama?  No, Ronald Reagan, from his February 1981 speech to the nation on the economy.

 

Here are a few other timely quotes from that speech to the nation:

We were once the greatest producer of automobiles, producing more than all the rest of the world combined. That is no longer true, and in addition, the “Big Three,” the major auto companies in our land, have sustained tremendous losses in the past year and have been forced to lay off thousands of workers.

In other words, we’ve lived through this before.  And, the auto companies have never “fixed” their issues.

I urge those great institutions in America, business and labor, to be guided by the national interest, and I’m confident they will. The only special interest that we will serve is the interest of all the people.

If only these words were heeded today.

 

Circumstances in 1981 were similar but not quite the same.  Mortgage rates were at 15.4 percent and inflation approached 13 percent. But the national debt had ballooned, taxes were eating a growing percentage of family income, seven million Amercians were unemployed and many couldn’t afford their homes.         

 

However, Ronald Reagan’s solution was to propose an economic package of budget reductions and tax reform.  He sought to reign in federal spending and increase the take-home pay of Americans.  The differences in his approach contrasts to that of “Team Obama” due to the fundamental contrast in how they view our economy and our national wealth.  See how these words of Ronald Reagan below contrast to President Obama’s:

 

“We can create the incentives which take advantage of the genius of our economic system — a system, as Walter Lippmann observed more than 40 years ago, which for the first time in history gave men “a way of producing wealth in which the good fortune of others multiplied their own.”

 

“Our aim is to increase our national wealth so all will have more, not just redistribute what we already have which is just a sharing of scarcity. We can begin to reward hard work and risk-taking, by forcing this Government to live within its means.”

 

“Over the years we’ve let negative economic forces run out of control. We stalled the judgment day, but we no longer have that luxury. We’re out of time.”

 

Time’s Up. I’ll let those words speak for themselves. 

 

Source:  ”Address to the Nation on the Economy from the White House February 5, 1981,” The Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan.  Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1981/20581c.htm accessed February 25, 2009.