Reply #8: He's still scaring me. [View All]

[Octafish]

Crisis Inspires Rethinking of ‘Reaganomics’

by Sam Zuckerman

Published on Sunday, October 19, 2008 by The San Francisco Chronicle

Big government is staging a comeback.

Former President Ronald Reagan’s stance against big government set the tone for economic policy. (David Ake / AFP/Getty Images) When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, he famously declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Since then, conservative small-government ideas built on a foundation of deregulation and low taxes have dominated the debate over what role Washington should play in the economy.

Now the tide is turning, political experts on the right and left say. A combination of circumstances, including the resurgence of the Democratic Party and fallout from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, is giving impetus to wholesale expansion of government economic intervention.

“We’ve gone through a period of three decades when the default assumptions were conservative assumptions,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and a policy adviser in the Clinton administration. “That framework has probably been torpedoed by events.”

If Barack Obama is elected president and Democrats strengthen their grip on Congress, the period could be transformative. Democrats would enact a series of programs that they believe would boost economic growth and improve middle-class living standards.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/10/19-0

As if.