Reagan enjoyed many victories as president. But starving the beast was not one of them. When he left office, federal spending was 20 percent higher, … - David Meyer Wessel
" "Reagan enjoyed many victories as president. But starving the beast was not one of them. When he left office, federal spending was 20 percent higher, adjusted for inflation, than it had been when he arrived, and he never found a way to pay for it. In the twenty years before Reagan became president—under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter—the budget deficit averaged well under 1 percent of GDP. In Reagan’s eight years, it averaged 4.25 percent of GDP.
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About David Meyer Wessel
David Meyer Wessel (born February 21, 1954) is an American journalist and writer. He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. He is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for 30 years.
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Additional quotes by David Meyer Wessel
The public remains strikingly misinformed about the budget. The typical respondent to a CNN poll said food stamps accounted for 10 percent of federal spending; it’s closer to 2 percent. Maybe being off by a factor of five is understandable given the enormity and complexity of the budget. But it’s harder to make sense of a 2008 Cornell University poll in which 44 percent of those who receive Social Security checks and 40 percent of those covered by Medicare say they “have not used a government social program.”
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