Ronald Reagan would have a lot to say about today’s Congress

Sen. Mitch McConnell, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA: . . . President Reagan changed the way we thought about government, and his plan for putting his vision into practice had a profound impact on the nation and the world. Yet many of my colleagues on the other side seem to have come down with a serious case of amnesia about all this. . . . When Reagan took office, inflation and jobless rates were climbing steadily. Interest rates on home mortgages were as high as 20%, which is hardly even imaginable today. Marginal income tax rates were 70% and 48%. And the Dow Jones Industrial Average, . . . was hovering around 800 . . .

No one had ever communicated it the way Ronald Reagan did. . . . when he talked about the size of government. He didn’t throw numbers at you, he gave people an image they could take home with them, and one they could all relate to and laugh about. . . . Reagan communicated his philosophy with a smile, and that was much of his secret. He made many of us feel for the first time in our lives that it was okay to be a conservative, that being conservative was cool. And when he put his philosophy into action, we soon found out that having conservative views was more than just okay. As a matter of policy, it was tremendously effective.

Remember: as the Reagan Revolution began, the socialist hold on Europe was still growing tighter. . . . The burden of government in most of Old Europe today is staggering. Government spending consumes more than 50% of the entire gross national product of France and Sweden and more than 45% in Germany and Italy. Compare that to about 20% in the U.S, a country that spends much more as a percentage of GDP than all of these countries on defense. The effect of all this spending in European capitals has been alarmingly high unemployment rates and economic stagnation for much of Old Europe. Which makes sense: as services increase, people depend on them more. And as people depend on them more, taxes go up. As taxes go up, people have less incentive to work - a dangerous and unsustainable cycle. . . . ‘Europe’s economy is so bad’ . . . ‘because government is too big.’ We’ve seen a number of signs that Old Europe is finally beginning to catch on. . . . a number of European countries have been slowly moving in the direction of greater economic freedom in recent years. Last year, the average personal income tax for all Western industrialized countries was down to 43%, compared to 67% in 1980. . . . The Wall Street Journal has referred to all this as the economic counterpart to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And Ronald Reagan pulled out the first, crumbling stones. . . .

What about us? Are we acting on the lessons of 1981? Or have we already forgotten them? . . . In one of the great political ironies of our time, the new Majority in Congress seems intent on taking America down the path of bigger government and higher taxes just as Europe is frantically trying to steer themselves away from it. These guys want to turn the United States into France when even the French are beginning to have second thoughts. . . . But the only people who don’t seem to have gotten the memo just took over the House and the Senate. For the last seven months, Republicans have been fighting off a raft of proposals that seem better suited to The Hague than The Heartland.

First, there was an effort to regulate grass-roots groups into the ground by forcing them to comply with burdensome new disclosure rules. . . . Then there was a plan to dismantle a wildly successful prescription drug benefit for seniors by modeling it after a price-controlled government model. Then there was the union-backed effort to eliminate secret ballot elections from union drives -- Which even four out of five union members opposed. Then there was a budget blueprint that contemplated a tax hike three times higher than any tax increase in history. And then, just last month, the other side unveiled a plan to extend a government insurance program that was created for the uninsured children of low-income parents to the already-insured children of middle-income parents as well. If you’re anything like me, you’re scratching your head and saying, ‘I thought we already tried that.’ We did. We called it Hillarycare. . . .

So just when Europe seems to have woken up to the wisdom of Reagan’s policies, the current Congress is getting nostalgic. . . . Because many of the people who have assumed leadership roles in Congress since the last election are the Old Guard, the senior members of the party who cut their teeth as lawmakers during the era of the Great Society, well before Reagan’s policies put us on a glide path to prosperity. These are the people drafting the laws that are coming out of Congress these days, the heirs of the Lyndon Johnson era. And they don’t seem to have learned much in the interim. . . . Congress today seems intent on applying solutions that didn’t even work when they were fresh, to new challenges. . . . It’s pretty clear that the new Congress has embraced big tax hikes, Big Labor, and big government with new gusto. And the results, if these policies are enacted, should be predictable to anyone who lived through the ‘70s. . . .

Ronald Reagan would have a lot to say about today’s Congress. And he would say all of it with charm, great common sense, and good humor. He had seen the same mistaken approach to government before, and he laid out a plan for correcting the problems it created in a way that inspired and, more importantly, mobilized a nation. He made people feel like they were part of something great, and that this something was great precisely because it was American. This nation had been proud, he told us, and he restored that pride and that idealism. And we loved him for it. . . . Ronald Reagan’s success lay in the fact that he spoke about the future in the accents of the past. And if I were to offer an assessment of the new Majority in Congress, . . . I would say their ultimate undoing will be the fact that they speak about the past in the accents of the future. New problems, failed solutions. Republicans can still learn from Reagan, too. Just as our friends on the other side seem to have embraced a vision that he proved had run its course, so too should we be wary of an approach that doomed people like Barry Goldwater. Ronald Reagan ultimately outshined his conservative forbears because he articulated conservative principles with optimism and an openness to others and the world. . . . [Read More]

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