In this Tech Central Station op-ed, Arnold Kling places Ronald Reagan’s economic policies into the context of his presidency, and corrects several misconceptions regarding those policies. First, Mr. Kling puts the economic problems that confronted Reagen into the context from which they arose:

Richard Nixon, like Ronald Reagan, inherited an economy that needed a dose of tight money in order to bring inflation under control. However, Nixon took office at a time when liberal economists had been arguing for more than a decade that inflation could be contained without a recession by using “incomes policies,” a euphemism for government interference in wage and price setting. In the fall of 1971, over the objections of his conservative economic advisers, Nixon decided to give “incomes policies” a try. The result, over the next several years, was that the cure was worse than the disease: “incomes policies” made inflation and unemployment higher, not lower.
In addition, as part of his 1972 re-election campaign, President Nixon undertook a large expansion of Social Security. Along with wage-price controls, this enlargement of the welfare state makes Nixon’s economic policies worse than those of any subsequent President, . . .

Mr. Kling then points out the vagaries of attributing relative economic progress to a particular President when that success is primarily attibutable to policies that his predecessor implemented:

When Ronald Reagan defeated Carter’s re-election bid, “incomes policies” were a proven failure. . . . [B]y 1980 it took a lot less courage to stand by a monetary approach to disinflation than it did a decade earlier. I believe that Carter would also have stuck with Volcker through the recession, and if that is the case, then the behavior of the economy in the 1980s would have been about the same regardless of who had been President. Of course, I generally believe that the business cycle follows its own course, and that giving credit or blame to a President is an attribution error. Thus, Presidents who enjoy strong economic performance, like Clinton, are over-rated . . . , while Carter, who suffered from the policy errors of previous Administrations and had began to undo those errors, is under-rated on economics. (I have plenty of issues with Carter on foreign policy, but that is another subject.)
I believe that President Reagan made a positive difference for the economy. However, unlike most analysts, I do not focus on his tax cuts. Instead, I think that Reagan’s main contributions were on energy policy, tax reform, and resisting government expansion.

Mr. Kling concludes with an ominous observation regarding the Bush Administration’s economic policies:

Finally, the government’s size ultimately will depend not on the tax rates that we set today but on the role that we choose for government long term in education, health care, and retirement security. If we continue to give government a large role in these fast-growing sectors, then spending and taxes as a share of GDP will inevitably increase. I call this “The Great Race,” and so far under President Bush it is a race that we are losing.