A Rupert Murdoch journalist tries to belittles President Reagan's achievements
Gerard Jackson
Jury out on the Reagan legacy was the title Roy Eccleston's article on President Reagan's death (Rupert Murdoch's Australian, 7 June). Reagan brings down the Soviet empire without a shot being fired and this is the best that Rupert Murdoch's Washington correspondent can come up with?
But according to the Bush-hating Eccleston President Reagan's policies only "probably hastened the end of communism and the Cold War". This is gross, particularly when we have Teddy Kennedy, in a moment of lucidity, publicly declaring that Reagan won the Cold War.
Only sheer bigotry and raw political spite can explain Eccleston's outlandish assessment.
If Republican-hating journalists are not attacking Reagan's deficits it's his debt. Eccleston says that Reagan tripled the US debt. Somehow we are supposed to deduce from this that the economy became worse off. Yet the debt was only 25 per cent of GDP during the Carter years when the economy suffered stagflation. Funny thing, though, he made no reference to the Carter years.
While the following OECD data puts the so-called debt problem in perspective it does not explain why journalists refuse to do likewise. Additionally, readers can draw their own conclusions regarding the relationship between debt and economics performance in the light of economic conditions during the Carter administration when government debt was significantly lower
What most commentators don't understand is that debt is not and never has been the problem — spending is the problem. Going into debt is a handy way for governments to avoid raising taxes. So which is worse? Debt or taxes?
It really is incumbent upon Reagan critics to explain why increasing debt is worse than increasing taxes.
Now if Eccleston was serious as well as informed, which he is not, he would have drawn attention to the explosion of non-defence spending which from 1988 to 1992 jumped by 40 per cent. This was due Democratic Congress's natural craving to spend. The same thing happened during the Reagan administration.
Continuing to paint a picture of economic incompetence Eccleston accused Reagan of driving "the budget deep into deficit". Now in 1983 the deficit peaked at 6.3 per cent of GDP and then began to fall, reaching 2.9 per cent in 1989. It was about 3 per cent under Carter. Not really much of a difference. These are simple facts that Eccleston chose to ignore.
Continuing to diminish Reagan's record Eccleston referred to a C-Span poll of historians who rated Reagan 11th of the 43 president, rating him one of the worst for "administrative skills".
In a typically unbiased fashion Eccleston backed up the objective findings of this poll with an objective opinion of Reagan by Democrats who, surprise, surprise, "said he was among the worst presidents ever".
This so-called survey was conducted by Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr (self-appointed keeper of the Kennedy flame) who deliberately built a bias into it by overwhelmingly selecting authors, e.g., Alan Brinkley, Doris Goodwin, the Marxist Eric Foner and Robert Dallek, noted for their anti-Republican sentiments.
Republicans were, as expected, virtually excluded. For the survey to have any credibility it would have had to include the likes of Kissinger, Kirkpatrick, Buckley, Kristol and Shultze. One can easily imagine the scorn and contempt that journalists like Eccleston would have poured on a Republican survey that ranked Roosevelt or Truman as merely average or worse.
In response to Schlesinger's rigged findings Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship asked prominent experts on the presidency what they thought of the survey. Kissinger called Reagan a near-great president who "hastened victory in the Cold War".
Kirkpatrick accused Schlesinger's experts of prejudice and praised Reagan for "demonstrating the superiority of free markets and free societies over socialism." Former executive editor of the New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal, declared that: "There was a communist empire and it was evil. . . historians will judge him [Reagan] as near great for his contribution to the downfall of the evil empire."
No wonder these, and others like them, were excluded from the survey. Yet Eccleston would have his readers believe that Schlesinger's rigged results were based on honest assessments that only right-wingers would question. As for Ranking the Presidents, it too has no credibility given the overriding left-wing prejudice of most of the contributors.
Eccleston was right in that most of President Reagan's spending was aimed at defence. Given that fact then we must also accept the fact that it was a fantastic investment that brought immeasurable benefits by bringing down the "evil empire".
Of course, if you are as mean-spirited and as politically bigoted as Eccleston you will begrudge President Reagan his victory.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 14 June 2004
