“Economic conditions are entirely different today than they were in Reagan’s era, and different conditions demand different policies. Those who say otherwise are simply engaging in cookie-cutter economics — proposing whatever was popular and seemed to work once, without regard to changing circumstances”—Bruce Barlett in a WaPo piece entitled “Why the GOP should stop invoking Reaganomics.”
The whole piece is worth a read, and the sentiment above underscores one of the major problems with the current GOP: they are not only backwards looking in terms of where their ideas are coming from, they do no understand the the basic premises of what they are asserting. Just evoking Reagan and calling for tax cuts as the sine qua non of policy is ultimately a wholly unserious approach to the complex and important job of actually governing.
