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Archive for the ‘Jimmy Carter’ Category

Ranking Jimmy Carter: Perhaps a Good Man, But Not a Good President

Posted in Economics, Inflation, Jimmy Carter, Regulation, tagged , , on December 30, 2024| 6 Comments »

I’ve graded the economic policy of every recent president, as well as three very bad presidents from the first half of the 20th century.

Today let’s consider the track record of the just-deceased Jimmy Carter.

On net, he was not a good president. As you can see from this table, his statist policies outweighed his good policies (though, unlike Biden, he actually had some good policies).

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Here are a few additional thoughts.

  • Inflation was so bad under Carter that it gets a double-weighting. It would have been triple-weighted, but Carter belatedly realized he screwed up and eventually replaced his bad Federal Reserve Chairman with a good Federal Reserve Chairman.
  • Creating new bureaucracies is a very bad step, though it’s important to understand that the federal government was already involved in education and energy. By creating two new departments, Carter was mostly making a symbolic mistake rather than a substantive mistake.
  • Government spending does not show up on the list because Carter wasn’t good like Reagan, but he wasn’t nearly as bad as other presidents (mostly profligate GOPers like Nixon, Bush, and Trump, but also the despicable LBJ).
  • There’s also no mention of trade for the same reason. Carter didn’t do anything good, but he also didn’t do anything bad.
  • Carter’s biggest positive accomplishment was transportation deregulation. I probably should have double-weighted it.
  • Carter was a somewhat incoherent mess on energy regulation.

Since I mentioned that Carter’s biggest accomplishment was transportation regulation, let’s look at some excerpts from a column earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.

Authored by former Texas Senator Phil Gramm (who was a Democratic member of the House of Representatives during the Carter Administration, the column elaborates on Carter’s good work on reducing intervention.

Jimmy Carter…doesn’t get enough credit for the quarter-century economic boom from 1983 to 2008 and the underlying resilience of the economy since. Without Mr. Carter’s deregulation of airlines, trucking, railroads, energy and communications, America might not have had the ability to diversify its economy and lead the world in high-tech development…Image The Carter deregulation helped fuel the Reagan economic renaissance and continues to make possible the powerful innovations that remake our world. The Airlines Deregulation Act of 1978, the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 unleashed competition and spawned the invention and innovation that gave America the world’s most efficient transportation and distribution system. The cost of flying a mile declined by half and air travel became a mainstay of American life. The logistical cost of moving goods shrank as a share of gross domestic product by 50%. …analysis based on hard facts showing that government policies harm the country are repeatedly crushed in Washington by the power of vested interest. It was Mr. Carter who took on the “Iron Triangle” of established business interests, unions and government and carried the political scars he suffered in defeating them. …Mr. Carter…gets too little credit for making our country more competitive.

Finally, I can’t resist mentioned Carter’s best accomplishment. He paved the way for Ronald Reagan.

P.S. Jimmy Carter even deregulated the beer market.

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Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden

Posted in Inflation, Jimmy Carter, tagged , , , , on June 12, 2022| 8 Comments »

Even though I recently praised him for his support of transportation deregulation, Jimmy Carter is widely considered to be a failed, one-term president.

Most people think his reelection prospects were doomed because of high inflation.

I suspect, however, that he was most hurt by falling levels of real income. And when I write “real income,”Image I’m referring to income after adjusting for inflation.

If you peruse the historical data from Table A-2 in the Census Bureau’s most recent report on income and poverty, you’ll notice that median household income (in 2020 dollars) dropped by nearly $2,000 between 1978 and 1980.

In other words, Carter may have survived double-digit inflation if incomes rose even faster than prices.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, we got rising prices and falling real income. This “stagflation” is probably the reason Ronald Reagan was elected, and the rest is history.

Moreover, history may be repeating itself.

Here’s a recent story from the Washington Post. I’ve excerpted the key passages, but all you really need to do is read the headline.

…the World Bank warned… Not since the 1970s — when twin oil shocks sapped growth and lifted prices, giving rise to the malady known as “stagflation” — has the global economy faced such a challenge. Image…“The risk from stagflation is considerable…,” said David Malpass, president of the multilateral development institution in Washington… Investors also could take a beating from a repeat of ‘70s-style stagflation. The S&P 500 stock index, already down more than 13 percent this year, could lose an additional 20 percent or more, according to a recent client note from Bank of America.

The World Bank mostly focused on the risks for the global economy.

But we are already suffering from stagflation in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

ImageSimply stated, 2021 was a terrible year for household incomes and the first half of 2022 has been even worse.

And I strongly suspect this is why Joe Biden has terrible poll numbers.

Ironically, The big uptick in inflation isn’t even Joe Biden’s fault. The Federal Reserve deserves the blame, mostly for what it did in 2020 before Biden became president.

That being said, Biden reappointed Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Fed’s Board of Governors. By rewarding Powell’s failure, Biden is now in no position to deflect blame.

P.S. Rising prices and falling income under Jimmy Carter gave us Ronald Reagan, so bad policy indirectly led to a good outcome. As of now, it’s unclear if there’s a new version of Reagan to rescue us from today’s version of stagflation.

P.P.S. For readers who are not old enough to have experienced America’s national rejuvenation under Reagan, you can click here, here, and here to see “the Gipper” in action.

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