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Hope we don’t get fooled again; Jerry Miskulin; Beaver County Times; September 8, 2014.
I encourage you to review Mr. Miskulin’s body of work in the archives. Mr. Miskulin has written at least 99 letters since 2004 (I didn’t critique all of them.). Most (all?) are illogical and full of falsehoods (not just wrong).
Mr. Miskulin expressed displeasure with the tea parties (here and here), proclaimed
Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.
“I was at a rock show and they were playing music before the band came on. Of all the songs played, the only one to get a cheer was The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’
“So I started thinking about we Americans and how we’ve been fooled again. Ronald Reagan used Calvin Coolidge’s notion of trickle-down economics with its emphasis on borrowing, all the while the Soviets were not getting stronger but their civilization was collapsing. All that emphasis on military hardware was for nothing.”
[RWC] I don’t know from where Mr. Miskulin got his info about President Coolidge (R), but it’s wrong. Have you heard of the depression/recession of 1920-1921 [the last year of the Woodrow Wilson (a Progressive Democrat and in a survey’s top six to eight presidents) administration]? Probably not, though most of us learned about the Roaring ‘20s. So how did we get from a depression/recession to the Roaring ‘20s? Presidents Warren G. Harding (R) and Coolidge must have jacked up spending, taxes, and debt, right? Not even close. Using 1920 (the first year after World War I) as a base, the Harding/Coolidge administrations reduced spending 55% by 1927, reduced taxes 45% by 1925, ran eight straight surpluses, and reduced debt from $26 billion to $16.9 billion by mid-1929. Clearly, so-called “trickle-down economics” does not have “an emphasis on borrowing.” According to the BLS, unemployment for 1923-1929 averaged 3.3%. Now you know why lefties like to brush over the 1920s and belittle Messrs. Harding and Coolidge; it provides proof Hoover/FDR/Obama “stimulus” programs don’t work but conservative principles do.
If you’re familiar with Mr. Miskulin’s letter-writing body of work, you’ll remember he has a “thing” about Mr. Reagan. As I wrote in a previous critique, “Excluding the World War II years, Presidents Johnson, Ford, and Carter all ‘ran record budget deficits’ before Mr. Reagan took office, as did Presidents Bush (41 & 43), Clinton, and Obama after Mr. Reagan. Mr. Reagan invented ‘borrow and spend?’ When Mr. Reagan took office in 1981, there had been only eight non-deficit years since World War II and none since 1969. By Mr. Reagan’s last budget (FY 1989), tax revenue had increased from $599.3 billion in FY 1981 to $991.2 billion. That’s a tax increase of $391.9 billion, or 65.4%. The problem was spending. Mr. Reagan couldn’t get Congress to go along with spending cuts and as a result spending increased $465.6 billion, or 68.6%.”
The USSR “civilization was collapsing” since its birth in 1922, but a third-world civilization/economy didn’t stop the USSR from having a superpower military for all that time. The idea “emphasis on military hardware was for nothing” is wrong. First, our military had been allowed to deteriorate a bit after Vietnam. Second, President Reagan recognized the tremendous drain a superpower military had on the USSR’s third-world economy. As a result, Mr. Reagan knew the USSR could not keep up with the military spending of the U.S. and its allies. The USSR leadership knew this as well. That led to the USSR getting out of Afghanistan and retreating a bit in its military support of other Iron Curtain countries, enabling the Revolutions of 1989 in the IC countries. This realization also led to Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost initiatives, intended to prop up the dictatorship but which instead likely hastened its demise by a little. With or without perestroika and glasnost, the USSR government was doomed.
“George W. Bush used weapons of mass destruction as a catalyst to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, much as LBJ used the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to illegally start the war in Vietnam.”
[RWC] While LBJ and Congress greatly increased our involvement in Vietnam, JFK initiated our combat involvement in Vietnam, not LBJ. I don’t know what Mr. Miskulin means by “illegally.” Congress passed the GTR and LBJ signed it into law. The GTR states, “Consonant with the Constitution of the United States and the Charter of the United Nations and in accordance with its obligations under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”
“Finally, we cannot continue to grow the economy with inflation and call that legitimate growth. Since Reagan’s Reaganomics, all we do is borrow money and call that economic growth. The only thing about borrowing money isn’t that you have to pay it back, but that it creates an illusion of success.”
[RWC] “Borrowing money … [doesn’t] create an illusion of success.” GDP (“economy”) growth as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis takes inflation/deflation into account. That is, GDP growth we hear about in the news is not artificially inflated/deflated by inflation/deflation. This means GDP growth during the Reagan administration was real, not a result of inflation.
“I can hear it now: ‘We won’t get fooled again.’”
[RWC] It’s easy to be fooled if you don’t know the facts, and Mr. Miskulin either doesn’t know the facts or ignores them.
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