There wasn’t much cause for excitement that cold Monday a century ago. There was no reason to expect the boy born in a little room above a store in Tampico, Illinois would amount to much. His was a very modest family, after all. As the baby would recall later in life, “We didn’t live on the wrong side of the tracks, but we were close enough to hear the train whistles.”
Yet it turned out that baby was very remarkable, indeed. His parents named him Ronald Wilson Reagan, and the long journey that started in that forgotten Illinois town eventually took him to Hollywood stardom, the California Governor’s mansion and ultimately to the White House.
February 6, 2011 is an important date for all of us. The centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth is an opportunity to revisit his legacy and to consider its importance today.
We Granite Staters are very familiar with President Reagan. His victory in the 1980 GOP New Hampshire presidential primary set him on the path that led to the Reagan Revolution. For 50 years before that, many Americans were under the spell of “New Deal thinking.” President Franklin Roosevelt’s emergency response to the Great Depression took root and became the way people viewed all problems: whenever a new one arose, a big, powerful federal government would step in and make it go away, usually by throwing huge piles of borrowed money at it and by enacting regulations that restricted individual freedom and hamstrung small businesses. To put it bluntly, Washington grew too big for its britches, and its spending binges were sending America to the Poor House.
Then Ronald Reagan arrived on the national stage. He confidently proclaimed “Government isn’t the solution; government is the problem.” He proved…
…his point with short illustrations like this one: “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
Reagan’s guiding principles were basic: government was too big, taxes were too high and the Soviet Union was evil. Critics dismissed them as “simplistic.” But as he won over people to his conservative thinking, Reagan started producing results. He didn’t get everything he sought: government didn’t get smaller as he had hoped, but the rapid pace of its expansion slowed. Taxes didn’t go down as much as he wanted, but he did produce the first major tax cuts in 20 years. And while the Soviet Union still existed when he left office in 1989, the “Evil Empire” was gasping its final breath.
It’s been 22 years since Reagan left Washington. But having just finished my first month on Capitol Hill, I call tell you his legacy is needed today more than ever.
For while many people adopted Reagan’s principles, Washington didn’t. In recent years, federal spending has become appalling, and the federal debt has spiked to the point where thoughtful people shudder. The Congressional Budget Office announced in late January that deficit spending will reach $1.5 trillion dollars this year and could soon become larger than our entire economy.
But there is reason to be hopeful as we mark the centennial of “The Gipper’s” birth. People are saying “Enough is enough!” They’re finally demanding that we cut wasteful spending. They want our scarce financial resources spent on necessities, not wasted on frivolous extras. And they want to stop the federal overreach into our daily lives, such as the government mandating that you must purchase health insurance, and inserting itself into the relationship between you and your family doctor.
The House is responding. One of our very first actions the day the new Congress convened was to cut congressional staff funding by 5%, saving more than $30 million. Now we’re busy identifying every dollar we can cut from the next budget that takes effect in October.
The House has voted to repeal last year’s flawed health care reform act, and is now looking at ways to deliver the true reforms Americans really want. It will be a long, hard struggle, and I will be talking with you about it in more detail in the weeks and months to come.
All in all, not a bad start for our first month at work. And, as Reagan himself was fond of saying, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
So happy birthday, President Reagan. Thank you for still inspiring us to do the right things today.
