The speech is here.
Unfortunately the numbers don't lie. Shortly after that speech, economic growth rolled over definitively. I think Reagan said what he said because serious people around him were telling him we were in big trouble (1982) and he didn't want to believe it. It was a denial of reality, similar to the denial of reality so typical today from Donald Trump.
Michael W. Green (@profplum99) describes in a recent essay in great detail many of the ways in which we are indeed poorer, especially people who have to live in New Jersey and work in New York, in his "My Life is a Lie" here.
The essay resonates mostly with people in the top 20%, which certainly doesn't include YT. But I found it very interesting, however, for how it starts off resting on the mistaken assumption that we have "healthy GDP growth". It is Green's unquestioned and fatal premise, no different than Reagan's or Trump's before him.
We do not have healthy GDP growth now, nor have we had it for a long time, at least not commensurate with a population which has grown by 106 million since 1984.
The compound annual growth rate for GDP from 1929 to 1984 was 6.869%, but through 2024 has fallen 26% to 5.079%.
"Well, that doesn't sound so bad", you say.
Well, the 5.079% rate has given us GDP of $29.3 trillion through 2024.
But at the 6.869% rate we would have GDP of $60.4 trillion, $31.1 trillion more than we do, more than twice as much again.
We have multiple new generations who expected the 1984 fairy tale who are now on the receiving end of 50% less than what might have been.
Solving this growth problem has been the number one aspiration of many on the right year in and year out, but no one has delivered on it. The current pack are not conservatives. They've given up. They are simply hyenas, feasting off the flesh of the wounded, of whom there are more than ever.
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| The roll over of GDPA CAGR in 1981 was retested in 1984 (black line) |
