photo #2058187

Ronald Reagan laid into the root cause of inflation: out-of-control government spending. He said Carter had blamed a host of other actors for inflation, including OPEC and the Federal Reserve; Carter, Reagan said, “has blamed the lack of productivity on the American people; he has then accused the people of living too well, and that we must share in scarcity, we must sacrifice and get used to doing with less.” That would not do for Reagan: “We don’t have inflation because the people are living too well. We have inflation because the government is living too well.”