8 million Americans were out of work in 1980, and Ronald Reagan said the White House had just blamed them for inflation.
2 million of them had lost their jobs in just the last few months.
Reagan said all this on the debate stage against Jimmy Carter. He started by attacking an idea: that inflation had come upon the country like a plague, that it was uncontrollable and nobody could do anything about it.
Entirely spurious, he called it. And dangerous to tell people.
Then he gave his numbers. When Carter became president, inflation was 4.8%, cut in 2 by Gerald Ford. Now it was running at 12.7%.
Carter had promised not to use unemployment as a tool against inflation. Yet his 1980 economic message called for lower productivity, lower GNP and higher unemployment. In January, Reagan said, inflation had been over 18%.
Then came the list of who Carter had blamed: OPEC, the Federal Reserve, low productivity, and finally the American people, for living too well. They would have to share in scarcity and learn to do with less.
His time was running out, so he went fast.
His fix was more productivity and a cheaper government. Balance the budget and stop flooding the market with printing-press money.
"We don't have inflation because the people are living too well."
"We have inflation because the government is living too well."
$7B of "undeserved profit" is what Ronald Reagan said the government took from inflation in 1 year of income taxes.
His argument in 1976 fit into 1 sentence. Washington doesn't feel the pain of inflation the way you do, because it makes a profit on it.
The $7B came from your raise.
You get a cost-of-living raise. It only keeps you even with prices. But it pushes you into a higher tax bracket, so you pay a higher percentage in tax and lose purchasing power.
Multiply that across every paycheck in America, and you get the number. "And this year they'll do even better," he said.
Then he showed how Congress handled its own pay.
The July before, Congress had very quietly passed a law, and the president signed it. Every congressman would now get an automatic pay increase whenever the cost of living went up.
It would have been nice, Reagan said, if they'd thought of something like that for the rest of us.
His fix was to repeal the automatic raise. In his view, the people whose spending caused inflation should feel it like everyone else.
Their raise was automatic. Yours came with a higher tax bracket.
@Benderxxx7 29,000 jobs added against 90,000 expected, unemployment up to 4.2%, and that's the last report before the midterms.
Same man said boom in both 2007 and now.
@0xQwertyx He already had the headline written in his head before anyone proposed raising rates, that's not restraint, that's foresight about reputation