You're Living in Ronald Reagan's World

[RangerCat67 at aol.com]

I thought that the predictions made by left and liberal pressure groups in 
1996 (i.e., that welfare reform would plunge a further one million children 
below the poverty line) hinged on economic forecasts made by the Clinton 
Administration the year before. I vaguely remember a time in which the 
Federal Reserve Board of Governors, prostrate before their shrines of Ayn 
Rand, determined that full employment was 95% (a notion that would probably 
have scandalized most Eisenhower Republicans, with the exception of Clinton 
and Gore), and that interests rates had to go up so that the economy would 
slow down, creating an untenable "last to arrive, first to go" situation for 
those forced to go off welfare. Of course, that situation did not 
materialize, but how would this experiment have worked in the thick of the 
1982 and 1991 recessions, I wonder? I'm sure that the more left-leaning 
commentators have tried to make something of this, but it seems as though the 
American Prospect crowd haven't bothered.