Letters

There is a big difference between history repeating itself and a wholesale rewrite of it.

The vice chair of the Southampton Democrat Committee, Andrea Klausner, makes the bold statement, “The Democratic Party’s approach to strengthening the economy has always worked” [“History Repeating,” Letters, April 7]. I’m not an economist but I have lived a few years under Democrat administrations, and that dog won’t hunt. It took World War II to propel the United States out of the Depression and to spark an economic expansion, not President Franklin D. Roosevelt or his expansion of government programs.

During the Dwight Eisenhower years, infrastructure was greatly expanded, and that meant roads and bridges, and not the play on words we have today. During the Democratic presidency of Jimmy Carter, we had a deep recession, astronomical interest rates and an oil embargo that crippled the American economy — until a great Conservative named Ronald Reagan took the helm in 1980. Instead of growing government and the consumption of citizens earnings, he pledged to shrink government, reduce taxes and regulation so our economy would have the freedom to expand, and it did.

By the end of his first term, the economy was expanding rapidly, interest rates were falling and record tax revenue was flowing into the Treasury. This economic boom helped fuel the rearmament of our military and led directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This geopolitical benefit helped the Clinton administration and its Republican Congress balance the budget for the first and only time in my life.

The effort to support the American economy during the COVID experience was initiated at the end of the Trump presidency with a bipartisan bill that made almost $2 trillion available to families and businesses to sustain them. As this aid was being distributed, the election of a Democratic administration occurred, and it immediately set out to borrow and spend several more trillion dollars in questionable programs that were partisan giveaways and indigestible without causing significant harm to a recovery already in progress. But Democrats demanded these huge sums to help secure and fund the patronage their political model thrives on. Fortunately they have not been able to secure the obscene funding they desire.

Evidence of their mismanagement, in the form of runaway inflation, is having an alarming effect on every aspect of consumption by ordinary Americans.

Compounding this economic hardship has been the draconian restriction of oil and gas production from American fields and wells. This self-inflicted damage to our economy by the Biden administration hardly supports the thesis that Klausner promotes. It was the Republican Trump economy that shook off eight years of the beleaguered Democratic Obama/Biden economy and restored full employment, energy self-sufficiency and an economic boom for America.

Ed Surgan

Westhampton