Jimmy Carter: The First Reaganite

In 1976 American voters registered their anger at Watergate, Richard NixonThe Republican Party and the Federal Government in general by choosing as President Jimmy Carter – with a term each in the state of Senate of Georgia and the country house of the governor and no experience with Washington DC.

Carter often denounced “Washington” on the campaign track and did little to distinguish between the Republicans and Democrats of the city. “They all stolen my water,” George Wallace, who pioneered with anti-Washington rhetoric, complained about both Ronald Reagan and Carter, “they drink from my dipper.” Challenging President Ford for the Republican nomination, Reagan warned that, in a country that sees furiously in ‘Washington’, a man who had served in the congress for 24 years before the appointment in the White House was an important handicap against the Georgia Peanut Farmer. So he was.

Carter was also a democrat from an increasingly republican region that had learned to cut his sailing accordingly. “I said during my campaign [for Georgia governor in 1970] That I was not in favor of taking away the right to work, and that is a position that I still maintain, “he wrote in 1971. In 1976 he told the leaders of the Union:

This, he claimed, “has always been my position since 1970.” Many voters see him as ‘vague, two faces, too political’, and democratic ‘liberals’ suspicious. A reporter wrote that “old democratic politicians greet him more often than not a naturalized march instead of as a colleague soldier.” This culminated in Edward Kennedy who challenged Carter in 1980.

If Carter could be ideologically flexible, he was not a clean slate. Jules Witcover wrote that:

Carters skepticism compared to federal job programs came from a broader criticism of the role of the government. “We need patience and goodwill,” he told the congress 1978:

This was a break with the ‘liberalism’ of ‘the great society’.

As the recovery of the recession of 1974-1975 faded and the economy deteriorated, Carter largely rejected the Keynesian remedies of more money prints and government spending. Despite the claim of ignorance of the causes of or remedies for rising inflationHe pretended to understand that inflation in the popular formulation was “too much money that pursued too few goods.”

If that was the problem, half of the solution was on the supply side by increasing the number of goods on which the money could be spent. To this end, Carter deregulated the airline, truck, rail and telephony industry. “These promotions,” Susan Dudley Writes: “Allow newcomers to the markets, increased efficiency, reduced prices, offered consumers more choices and probably contributed to falling inflation.”

The other half of the solution was on the demand side by reducing the amount of money. Carter appointed Paul Volcker -President of the Federal Reserve in 1978. “We needed a new approach,” Volcker wrote: “Simply put, we would arrange the amount of money (the amount of money) instead of the price of money (interest rates). “As money growth, the interest rates rose in 1980 and unemployment became 7.2%, but inflation would fall from 13.5% to 3.2% in 1983. By that time Carter was no longer an office And Reagan feared a re -election of landslides due to an economic boom thanks part, to Carter’s deregulating and noise policy.

The economic chaos of the 1970s even forced the center of governments, such as James Callaghan’s labor government in Great -BritainTo recognize the death of Keynesianism. The global shift to economic freedom in the eighties and nineties was not the result of a nasty ideological coup, but of a widespread realization that the alternative simply did not work. In some respects Jimmy Carter was the first Reaganite.