Word: reaganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...much did federal spending outstrip revenues in the past 12 years? Several measurements are possible. For example, cumulative budget deficits over the period added more than $2 trillion to the national debt. Or you can look at the annual record and watch the deficits mount. In the Reagan-Bush years to date, the average annual deficit has been about $200 billion. In six of those 11 years, the actual amount was well in excess of $200 billion, and this year -- despite the much ballyhooed 1990 "budget agreement" between Congress and the White House -- it will explode to some $400 billion...
...good. Back in the days of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, deficits generally hovered at a relatively harmless 1% or 2% of gdp, except for a brief uptick to 3% at the end of the Johnson Administration to help pay for the Vietnam War. In contrast, during the Reagan-Bush years, the deficit's share of gdp shot up to between 3% and 7%, meaning that government red ink was weighing far more heavily on the economy -- even on a rapidly expanding one -- than ever before in peacetime, sopping up credit that would otherwise have been available to the private...
...difficult choices that are likely to disrupt the life of the nation and the individual lives of virtually all of its citizens. That is why so few incumbent politicians -- and so few voters -- have been willing to engage in serious discussions of the problem. That is also why Presidents Reagan and Bush, for all their budget-balancing rhetoric, never came within $60 billion of actually submitting a balanced budget to Congress...
That pledge has even more resonance now that Perot has signed up two men who understand their own parties' weaknesses. The son of a California electrician who grew up in public housing, Rollins is in many ways typical of the Reagan Democrats who began to abandon the party in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rollins worked for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, then ran Jack Kemp's ill-fated 1988 bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Still built like the high school wrestler he once was, Rollins is a nuts-and-bolts political operative who, friends say, was restless...
...Truman and Roosevelt -- and of course he would have to win first -- but he already personifies an enduring strain in American life, a pervasive antipathy for insiders. It is this ideological hostility that prompted the Populist and Progressive movements and the rise of George Wallace, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. But the sentiments that fuel the surge for Perot ("Take our country back") are perhaps best understood as a 20th century manifestation of Jacksonian Democracy, the anti-Establishment revolt that captured the country's imagination in the 1820s, the very first voter rejection of the Washington Beltway...