President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday anniversary

Always at home on the range, President Reagan rides at his California ranch, Rancho del Cielo. He spent 335 days of his eight-year presidency there relaxing.

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Ronald Reagan talks about the “American Miracle” that was started with the tax cuts. This is his last speech to the nation as president.

I knew how to cure inflation a year before Ronald Reagan took office and I had no doubt that if he was elected that he would stop the excessive inflation we had experienced in the late 1970’s. Reagan was an admirer of Milton Friedman and he believed his film series had the answer to the problem of inflation. I also had seen Friedman’s film series and knew that the cure to inflation would work. How did I know that? I had become convinced by watching a 30 minute film  by Milton Friedman. I will show all 30 minutes in the next three posts. Here is the first post:

Take a look at this 8 minute clip below:

(R Row, from front to rear) Milton Friedman, George Shultz, Pres. Ronald Reagan, Arthur Burns, William Simon and Walter Wriston & unknown at a meeting of White House economic

Inflation was very high when Reagan took office and many said Reagan’s plan of tight money for 5 years would not work. William A. Niskanen and Stephen Moore have sent the record straight in their October 22, 1996 paper “Supply-Side Tax Cuts and the Truth about the Reagan Economic Record.” I will be sharing portions of that article with you over the next few days.

The Federal Reserve, Not Ronald Reagan, Deserves the Credit for Ending the 1970s Era of High Inflation
One man is more responsible for the political success of the Reagan presidency than any other, and his name is not Ronald Reagan. It is Paul Volcker, the man Jimmy Carter appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. A relatively stable currency has been the basis . . . for the economic boom of recent years. . . .
And Volcker did it. In October 1979 he persuaded his colleagues to starve inflation of the dollars it feeds on. President Reagan did little to help. In fact, his deficits worked against Volcker’s efforts (New Republic editorial, September 9, 1985, p. 7).

The conquering of inflation in a very short time was primarily a result of tightening monetary policy under Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker. Volcker deserves high praise for the change in policy. But Reagan clearly warrants a large part of the credit for endorsing the overdue correction in Federal Reserve policy from the high-inflation 1970s. A major element of Reaganomics, in addition to the tax cuts, was sound money–a policy the nation had not followed since the late 1960s. The Federal Reserve’s policy of sweating out inflation took place with the explicit approval of the Reagan administration, even though that policy contributed to the deep recession of 1981-82and the unexpectedly large and immediate fall in inflation was a major factor in the budget deficit explosion in the early 1980s.

President Reagan and Nancy Reagan talking with James Cagney, recipient of the Medal of Freedom, in the Blue room. 3/26/84.

Little known presidential facts:

1. In 1945, Congress voted to commemorate the work FDR did for the March of Dimes by putting his profile on the coin.ⁱ
2. Abraham Lincoln was the first president to ever be photographed at his inauguration. In the photo, he is standing near John Wilkes Booth, his future assassin.^k