ACTION

independent (6)

3 Economic Policies Reagan Had Right (And Obama Never Learned)

Posted by Trent Derr on March 17, 2011 at 7:30pm

by: Trent Derr - American Exceptionalism Blog

 

President Reagan is probably best known for three major accomplishments: rekindling the American spirit of entrepreneurship, defeating the Soviets in the Cold War leading to the eventual collapse of the USSR, and creating the most robust peacetime economic expansion in American history. In this posting, we’ll focus on topics more applicable to Reagan’s economic accomplishments. Reagan’s economic philosophy has been referred to by many names including Reaganomics and Supply Side Economics.

 

Arguably Reagan was dealing with a much more complex economic environment in 1980 than we have today. Reagan was faced with high unemployment, high inflation, high interest rates, a slow-growing economy and a high government deficit as a percentage of GDP. Today we primarily have high unemployment, a slow-growing economy and a high government deficit. However over the last two years the policies implemented by the Obama administration have not significantly reduced unemployment, have dramatically increased the government debt and have started to increase both inflation and interest rates. Note that inflation and interest rates were not a problem when Obama entered office. Continue...
Read more…

Barry Deceives Liberty – How Would You Respond to a Progressive?

Posted by Trent Derr on March 10, 2011 at 5:30pm

by: Trent Derr - American Exceptionalism Blog

 

My wife was seated in the airport waiting to catch her flight back home. So far so good. She was already past security waiting in the gate area. As usual, she was reading a book trying to pass the minutes until it was time to board. My wife can be as entertained by people watching as anyone. However if she has a good book, she would rather tune out the world and slip into a well written story, but not today. On this day, she along with everyone else in the gate area were going to have their concentration shattered by a guy on his cell phone. For sake of discussion, let’s call him Barry. Barry had a pretty deep voice, and he was talking loud.

 

It didn’t matter if you had on headphones, wore hearing aids or were half-deaf, you could hear Barry. His baritone voice blasted through the atmosphere at the gate such that everyone could hear every word he was saying. It became very clear, very quickly he was trying his best to get out of the dog house. It was obvious from his side of the conversation that Barry was in deep TROUBLE. He was in trouble with his girlfriend Liberty, and she was really ticked off. You couldn’t hear her side of the conversation, but it definitely was NOT PG-13. Barry was doing his best to convince his girlfriend over the phone that he wasn’t doing anything wrong. She wasn’t buying it.

 

That’s part of the reason why he was talking so loud. Continue...
Read more…

Ronald Reagan's Top 6 Military Principles and Their Impact on the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Posted by Trent Derr on March 8, 2011 at 7:00pm

Trent Derr - American Exceptionalism

 

President Reagan was a strong advocate of Peace through Strength. Essentially he believed that foreign powers were less likely to engage with the United States militarily if they were certain that they would receive immediate, disproportionate punishment from our armed forces. It’s the same philosophy that most of us were smart enough to learn in grade school: Bullies don’t pick on the strong kids. They pick on the weak kids. If a bully picks on you, punch them really hard in the nose. Not only will they go away, they will probably not pick on you again. They will slink off and look for a weaker target.

 

Along with Peace through Strength, Reagan had several other beliefs that guided his thinking regarding protecting America from foreign enemies. First: there is good and evil. Second, in facing evil, it is justified to use military force. Third, if we are going to use force, use overwhelming force. Fourth, nation building works if you have a nation to begin with. Fifth, technology and innovative tactics both help overcome manpower or military imbalances. Finally, always leave your enemies guessing how extreme your military response might be.

 

There is good and evil. There is right and wrong. Reagan clearly would have seen both Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda as evil and threats to the citizens of the United States.  Continue...
Read more…

WWRD? Part 2 – What would Reagan do about immigration?

Posted by Trent Derr on February 28, 2011 at 5:30pm

by: Trent Derr - American Exceptionalism

 

As a continuing part of our series What Would Reagan Do, we’re going to discuss what Reagan would do to address our current immigration problems. Clearly Reagan would have been shocked by our current situation related to rampant illegal immigration, the violence across our southern border in Mexico, and the crime being brought into American cities by illegal aliens.

 

Addressing Reagan’s views regarding immigration is complex because he had two seemingly conflicting views. For one, Reagan believed in the integrity of the borders of the United States. This view would have been only reinforced by our current international terrorism risks in a post 9-11 world. In fact one of Reagan’s most well-known quotes is: “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”

 

On the other side of the coin, Reagan believed the United States was the last great hope for the world. Reagan lived the American Dream and saw that dream as a gift from God for all free people. He fully understood the desire of the masses to come to America and to assimilate into the melting pot as Americans.  Continue...
Read more…

WWRD? (What Would Reagan Do) - How would Ronald Reagan address the challenges we have today?

Posted by Trent Derr on February 24, 2011 at 5:00pm

by: Trent Derr - Morning in America

 

Are you better off than you were two years ago? For most people, the answer is no. Compared to two years ago, more people are unemployed, the credit markets are still a mess, businesses are still being stymied by further federal regulation, and the global community has no idea what we stand for with our foreign policy.

 

What if we could roll the clock back? Roll it back a little more than two years to September 2008. At that time, the United States was at one of our more critical inflection points. We had military actions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our southern border states were seeing a serious uptick in crime being committed by illegal aliens, the economy was starting to stagnate, and we had a looming credit crisis. Over a series of postings, we’ll address how Reagan would have addressed each of these issues. What Would Reagan Do?

 

The Credit Crisis

 

Reagan was a true believer in the free market. He believed in capitalism, American businesses, and most importantly the American people. Reagan knew that one of the key mechanisms of the free market is to correct imbalances that occur in the exchange of goods and currency. If you ever had any doubt about Reagan’s belief in free markets, look at how he handled the stock crash on “Black Monday”, stock market collapse of October 19, 1987.  Continue...
Read more…

Our Sputter and Nicked Up Moment - Commentary on the State of the Union

Posted by Trent Derr on February 22, 2011 at 5:30pm

by: Trent Derr - Morning in America

 

I swore I heard that right.  Did the President say this is our “Sputter and Nicked Up” moment?  Was this the first time that he decided to finally come clean with the American people?   I thought to myself, well at least he was being honest in his State of the Union speech.  He’s finally breaking it to everyone that after his first two years in office he’s set the economy up for another dip… and a bad one.  Yes I know that the stock market has been going up for the last couple months and other economic indicators have had minor upticks.  This temporary uptick has been due to the FED pumping liquidity into the financial markets at a level nearly matching 90% of our current GDP.

 

But Obama has decided to come clean.  He’s telling us when the FED’s stimulus runs out again, the economy is going to sputter, fall back into recession, and we’re all going to get nicked up.  The latest stimulus by the FED is known as QE2 (Quantitative Easing 2).  Why is it called QE2?  Because QE1 didn’t work.   Yes Obama was able to leverage QE1 to trigger a rebound in the stock market but that happens when the FED pours cash into the financial market.    The impact of Quantitative Easing 1 stopped working in late April 2010, and the stock market swooned. continued...

Read more…