Live from Music Row, Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – official guest host Aaron Gulbransen welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
In 1978 Alfred Khan, who, by the way, might have been the best person in the Carter administration. You probably weren’t even born then. That would be my guess. In 1978, a Cornell University economist in charge of President Jimmy Carter’s inflation-fighting efforts, I’m quoting here from The Wall Street Journal.
They said that failure to get soaring prices under control could lead to a deep, deep depression. Carter’s aides, perturbed at the possible political fallout, instructed him to never use that word or recession again.
Now, we don’t know much about Khan’s wit, but I think he had a great wit because here’s how he responded to that. Khan punkishly said the next time he met with reporters that if we don’t get high prices under control, we are in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years.
And so you now have this administration that refuses to use the word recession. Aaron, I will henceforth talk about the banana that we are suffering and it might get worse and it might become the big banana.
Here’s the problem that we have now, and that is just as with Jimmy Carter, and I don’t know who said that expression, I’m not going to get exactly right, but if you don’t know history, you’re doomed to repeat its mistakes.
And in the late 70s, the circumstances that we had then were, and this is quite interesting, especially for people your age, because most of the people your age are not aware of this. But you reach the 70 percent tax bracket at $59,000, 70 percent.
So throughout the 70s, as inflation was raging, people got pushed into higher and higher tax brackets, and these were just people making regular wages.
So you had high taxes, you had an administration that was increasing regulations and you had an administration that was increasing spending. Well, let’s fast forward to today.
We have inflation. Excuse me, we have bananas. No, inflation is a word you can use, but not recession. You have inflation running rampant and frankly getting worse.
You may have a dip in the annualized rate here or there, but, but not the general inflation that we’re seeing because of additional government spending that was just passed. It looks like more government spending is going to be passed.
Biden is engaged in passing more and more regulations and he wants to raise 36 different taxes. He won’t get all those taxes raised, but he’ll get a lot of them raised.
Well, then Jimmy Carter lost the election and Ronald Reagan came in and in his very first press conference, he gave five minutes of comments before he took questions and he explained the situation we were in.
He said, here’s what we’re going to do to resolve the inflation and to put our economy back on a high growth track. He said we’re going to cut taxes to free the private sector, to create growth. He said we’re going to cut regulations to increase innovation.
And that will increase productivity, and we’re going to cut spending because there’s so much waste in government. But then he also said something that I thought was really interesting.
You go back and listen to it, he says, and I’m being forced to sign an extension of our federal debt. Federal debt. I’m increasing the ceiling to $80 billion as if that was a giant number. And back then, it was a giant.
We blow through $80 billion now every two to three weeks at the federal level. Every two to three weeks. And for Reagan, this was going to take care of six months to a year, at least. So Reagan cut taxes, he reduced regulations, and he cut spending, inflation was squashed, and the banana was stopped.
And we had a tremendous period of growth in our country and rising wages. To believe that you can have pretty much the same problems and impose a solution that is exactly the opposite of the solution that worked and expect the same results as the solutions that worked is ridiculous.
And unfortunately, it looks like we as a people are going to be forced to suffer for some period of time until the political winds change and Biden is drummed out of office.
Listen to the Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
