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Good advice - Clifton Journal Editorial Oct. 17, 2001
We’d like to offer a bit of advice to the presidential candidates: Promise to get government off our backs while staying out or our shrinking wallets and you just may get our vote.
FDR ran under such a platform. He promised to reduce federal spending, eliminate useless expenditures, and return authority back to the states, communities and the people, which had been unjustly seized by the federal government. He was a Democrat.
Ronald Reagan voted for FDR, then adopted similar views during his presidency. He was a Republican.
At the end of Reagan’s administration, the Nation was enjoying its longest recorded period of peacetime prosperity without recession or depression, so he knew a thing or two about running this country.
Reagan was skillful in getting legislation passed to stimulate economic growth, curb inflation, increase employment while still managing to strengthen national defense.
He did this by cutting taxes, not raising them, and cutting Government expenditures.
The people, after his first term, agreed with his policies and strongly returned him to the White House for another four years after he soundly defeated Democratic challengers Walter F. Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro.
In 1986 Reagan helped overhaul the income tax code, which eliminated many deductions and exempted millions of people with low incomes. All benefited, from the top earners to those at the other end of the spectrum. Wow, what a concept.
President Reagan offered much good advice which our current candidates should embrace. For instance, Reagan, in his first inauguration speech said:
"You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding: We are going to begin to act, beginning today.
"The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we've had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price."
Good advice in these tough social and economic times.
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