Max Boot
speaker
527 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Max Boot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
of 70% to a top rate of about 30%.
But at the same time as he was raising defense spending and cutting taxes, Reagan also promised he was going to balance the budget within a couple of years.
And the math just did not add up.
This is why George H.W.
Bush called it voodoo economics.
And so
David Stockman came in.
He had the job of translating these voodoo economics into an actual policy blueprint.
And very quickly, he figured out he couldn't do it.
They could cut taxes for sure.
That was popular.
But cutting spending, well, they could cut some spending, but they couldn't cut enough spending to balance the budget, especially not when they were increasing the defense budget.
So it just did not add up.
And the result of all that
was sky-high budget deficits, which was, Reagan later said that was the one regret he had about his presidency, was he didn't balance the budget like he had been promising to do.
And he had been campaigning for decades against federal deficit spending, and he added to the deficit spending.
But it kind of worked out anyway, because the reality was, even though he did add to the budget deficit, it didn't make much economic impact.
And I think the most important thing that Reagan actually did economically was to support Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Fed, as he was raising interest rates to wring the inflation out of the economy, which was very painful because it led to this massive recession from 1981 to 1983.
It caused a lot of economic pain.
But Reagan stood by the Fed.
Showing 301–320 of 527 · page 16 of 27
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