At the end of last month, Alex Park at
Mother Jones put together some charts, including the one above, demonstrating what has to be significant levels of cognitive dissonance among Republicans for whom Ronald Reagan, our 40th president, wears a political halo:
One of the many, many problems Jeb Bush faces in his quest for the Oval Office is his break from Republican orthodoxy on president Ronald Reagan's legacy. In 2012, Bush told a group of reporters that, in today's GOP, Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did"—namely, working with Democrats to pass legislation. He added that Reagan would struggle to secure the GOP nomination today.
Bush was lambasted by fellow conservatives for his comments, but he had a point: If you judge him by the uncompromising small government standards of today's GOP, Reagan was a disaster.
In February 1981, in his first address to Congress after getting elected, Reagan
said:
I've been trying ... to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion is. The best that I could come up with is that if you had a stack of $1000 bills in your hand only four inches high you would be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1000-dollar bills 67 miles high.
Like so many other things Reagan said, this wasn't true. A trillion-dollar stack of $1,000 bills would actually measure just over 63 miles high. Since the last one was printed in 1945 and use of all large denomination bills was discontinued by the Treasury in 1969, most Americans have never seen a $1,000 bill. What we're most familiar with are the $20 bills ATMs spit out. Reagan's image-makers missed the mark. A trillion-dollar stack of
twenties would be an impressive 3,150 miles high.
Read more about the Great Communicator's actual record below the fold.
The national debt nearly tripled on Reagan's watch, from $993 billion to $2.6 trillion. That makes a stack of Andrew Jacksons soaring 8,450 miles high.
As Park notes, Reagan said in his 1988 farewell speech that "man is not free unless government is limited." But, contrary to what the right wingers would have you believe, he did not preside over a smaller government. Rather the contrary. The federal workforce grew 324,000 during his term of office, of which uniformed military personnel were about one-fourth. The 1988 total was the highest it had been since 1971. By contrast, at the end of 2012, the tally of federal employees was almost a million less than in 1988.
Federal government employment (including uniformed military) grew six percent under Reagan. By the time President Bill Clinton left office, total federal government employment had fallen 22 percent, nearly 1.2 million from when Reagan finished his term. At the end of 2012, after President Obama's first term in office, total federal employment was slightly more than when Clinton left. Two-thirds of that increase—125,000—were uniformed military personnel. The overall total was still a million less than it had been when Reagan left office.
It can be argued that federal employment isn't as high as it ought to be. For instance, the Great Recession (and its aftermath) was the appropriate time for the government to be engaged in direct hiring in modernized programs like those of the New Deal that put millions to work in the depths of the Great Depression. And then there's the need for more enforcement of government regulations. IRS, OSHA, MSHA and EPA are all entities that could use more enforcers.
What can't be argued, however, is that the sainted Reagan kept the lid on federal spending and employment.