Carl T. Rowan Jr. Quotes

He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve. After all, Reaganomics set in motion one of the largest wealth redistributions in American history, away from the poor and toward the rich.

Nothing beats Reaganomics—though herpes can run it pretty close.

The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.

When, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said government is the problem, not the solution, he established the Republican mantra that has not changed in all the years since. It was a clever bit of rhetoric, but it has turned too many Republicans into economic simpletons.

Trickle down economics says that the best way to feed the birds is to give oats to the horse.

It reflects a reversion to the old idea that the tree can be fertilized at the top instead of at the bottom — the old trickle-down theory.

The idea behind Reaganomics is this: a rising tide lifts all yachts.

The media has brainwashed the electorate to expect the government to do something. The best economic policy of any government is to do nothing but reduce the size of the government, reduce the size of the laws, and reduce the size of regulations.

I guess the Reagan era is defined as the 'I want it all for me, and screw everybody else' era.

The global policy shift toward neo-liberalism that took place during the 1980s and 1990s was supposed, according to its proponents, to bring a convergence of living standards of richer and poorer nations. This never actually happened.

In the 1980s, we were advised, why don't you follow Reaganomics or Thatcherite economics. We said, yes, there are good points, let's see how we can fit them in the Indian economy. Every country has its own way of moving forward.

I wonder if these people today would think Reagan was a Reagan conservative.

The Reagan years showed us that expanding economic freedom should be the North Star - the guiding light - of U.S. policy, because it is the best way to achieve sustained and broad-based prosperity for all.

If we have George W. Bush as president, we're going to go back to the kind of policies we had when his father and Ronald Reagan were president.

The difficulty for the Government is there's this ideological straitjacket of the market will provide, let the market rip and everything will work out... It's back to trickle-down economics, which, it's plain to see, have not delivered.

I was first elected to public office when the Reagan revolution was in full swing. Maximizing freedom guided the policies of that era, with tremendous success.

Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.

At the same time, the Reagan Administration assured that the main elements of policymaking were in the hands of competent loyalists, thus assuring a successful launch and a highly successful first year.

Milton Friedman is a man with dangerously simplistic visions and explanations of the economic world.

President George W. Bush inherited the strongest economy and the largest surplus ever in American history. He has blown both of them. I thought that one of the things he would be good at is inheriting but he wasn’t able to even do that well.

… this little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address, but more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues of our nation.... The American people would rightly not tolerate this kind of concentration of power in government. Is it not fair and relevant to question its concentration in the hands of a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government?

They [the conservative Republicans] have tried to sell us this trickle down fairy dust before.

Some people will say that words like ‘scum’ and ‘rotten’ are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

In the 1980s and 1990s, radical change in economic policies fostered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put the brakes on government planning and ushered in a new free-market supply-side era and a two-decade boom. That model has been abandoned in the new century. This must be reversed.