Same in 2010 for ObamaDems.

The difference is that Reagan had put policies in place to encourage investment and job formation. Obama’s policies and the dems since 2007 are hostile to wealth creation of any kind.

Inflation and economic downturns have been measurably worse since the creation of the Fed than before. Greenspan and Bernanke both have some responsibility for the current problems in that they made easy money available for the RE bubble. ALL of the rest of the house of cards were based on the poorly secured sub-prime mortgages. These would never have existed without the Democrat’s Community Re-Investment Act. None of the many players who screwed up would have had anything to screw up with absent Sub-Prime Mortgages.

The first time I had to try to explain the Alaska economy was in ’90 in interest arbitration with our largest union. The union wanted at least the CPI since ’87 because they’d been without a contract since June ’86. Because of the price crash in ’86 CPI had been pretty much flat but there had been a sharp uptick in ’89. I had to try to lay out to an arbitrator from MN how the price was in the toilet and we couldn’t control production thus we had flat or declining revenue without regard to the CPI. The irony of it all was, because of Exxon Valdez our revenue was down due to production disruptions and tariff issues but, typically, Exxon had thrown around $100 bills where $10 bills would have done in getting labor and materials for the cleanup and all the money they spent eased the recession and caused the CPI to go up.

Achance that is so interesting thanks for the history.

The US stood idly by when Ghadaffi, then a Soviet client, nationalized the Libyan oil fields, in ’70 I think. The other Soviet client, Iraq followed suit, followed by the more Westward leaning Saudi Arabia and the emirates. At that point OPEC became something much more than social club or trade association. It seems lost to memory that these now rich and powerful Arab states and leaders had done little or nothing to develop the oil; they had just accepted their baksheesh and the Western oil companies fronted all the skill and money to develope the provinces, the biggie being AARAMCO, a joint venture of, principally BP and Exxon. With the nationalization, the World price of oil began to rise inexorably. The US was already fighting inflation because of the “guns and butter” policy in financing Vietnam. Increases in commodity prices led by oil aggravated the inflation to the point where Nixon instituted wage and price controls in ’71 or ’72. I’m working from memory so some of this may be a little off but the bright colors and broad strokes are right.

The Arab States felt real power in the ’73 War iwth Israel but with, and the Arabs thought because of, US intervention with weapons for Israel, the Arabs ultimately were defeated. The Arabs did no go gently. Since they now controlled all the oil from the Middle East, they put an embargo on oil exports to The West. The West’s economic paradigm was based on oil in the $5-8/bbl. range and even reaching that price paradigm had caused considerable inflation as pre-nationalization ME oil had been under $2/bbl. The TransAlaska Pipeline, at the time the largest and most expensive construction project in history, was based on economic viability with oil at $7.50/bbl., then very expensive oil when the project was approved in ’71. With the Arab Oil Embargo of ’74, the price of oil, if available at all, simply skyrocketed, ultimately reaching the mid – $30s/bbl. and the economy tanked as it did. About the only thing good that can be said for Carter’s tenure is that he didn’t much interfere with constrution of the TAPS though his Greenie friends certainly did and the price of the TAPS skyrocketed as well. By the time the environmentalists were through what had been projected to be about a billion dollar project had become an $8 billion dollar project, but by ’80, it was producing almost 25% of America’s oil. At the same time, BP, then an arm of the British Governent as well as Norway were bringing on the elephant field in the North Sea. By ’81, the dramatic increases in oil production combined with more resolute economic and foreign policy from both President Reagan and PM Thatcher first stabliized the price of oil and allowed the Western economies to catch up with that price and establish a new price paradigm.

The fields in Alaska and the North Sea went into production with the highest uplift rates of any major fields in the World. Uplift rate is production as a percentage of proven reserves. Throwing all that oil on the market combined with rational economic policies in both the US and GB broke the OPEC monopoly and the price of oil crashed in ’86, flirting with $10/bbl. and even less. A sound dollar, conservative tax policy, and a low, stable oil price all contributed to starting a boom that lasted from the mid-eighties until last September with only the minor and mostly media induced early ’90s recession that helped elect WJC who is given all the credit for things he had little to do with.

So, Carter had both bad policies and bad luck and even worse luck as the result of his own bad policies. Reagan had both good policies and good luck as did GHWB until the “recession.” WJC would have had bad policies which would have led to bad luck but he overplayed his hand in ’92-93 and lost control of the Congress causing him to have to accommodate Republican policies. The economy was robust enough to weather the bursting of the tech bubble and GWB and a Repubican Congress kept the economy rollicking despite the Democrats’ best efforts to talk the economy down. The Dem/Media propaganda war and weariness with real wars brought a Democrat Congress in ’06 and something, I think something really bad, brought first skyrocketing oil prices in ’07-’08 and an economic crisis and a communist takeover in late ’08.

Volker, head of the Fed, was a Democrat and didn’t care how bad the economy got with a Republican in the WH. He raised interest rates enough to choke inflation. Reagan took the price controls off oil and prices began to drop almost immediately. He went to the people and got the Democrats in the House to pass the tax cut. They phased it in so the effects weren’t felt until ’83. The Dems scored big gains in ’82 but by ’84 everyone in the country but the media knew who was responsible for the boom..