Reaganomics And Christie's Budget Cuts

by: IndependentNJ

Sun Mar 28, 2010 at 11:38:40 PM EDT

He decided to institute a policy called Reaganomics, or in other words, "trickle down economics". The idea behind this economic theory was that tax cuts without strings attached towards the top end could create jobs; because, after all, corporations could be trusted to create jobs with that tax cut instead of, say, spending that money on a trip to the Cayman Islands, where one will stay 7 days and 6 nights at the top resorts and eat the finest food, and see the sights in luxury, and maybe sometime in between, deposit some money in that secret account.

The result was predictable: the best analogy for it would be the rich kids getting lots of presents each in the hope that some of those presents would trickle down to the less fortunate, and the parental unit turned a blind eye as they used all the toys for themselves.

Now, flash forward nearly 30 years later. New Jersey, after many failed policies, decided to elect the no-nonsense prosecutor Chris Christie, who was the proponent of Reagan-esque economic philosophies. He decided that he was going to take a hatchet to school aid much like Reagan took a hatchet to taxes on the upper class. Problem is, it relies on the same trust Reagan put to the higher ups. Reagan trusted that the higher ups would create jobs with their tax cuts, and Christie is hoping that the higher ups will cut administrators before teachers with these municipal aid cuts, which as we all know, the "paraprofessionals" will keep their job, while teachers are cut and class size explodes.

If Reagan and Christie had attached more strings to their actions, then they could have made more sense. If Reagan had made his tax cuts conditional on job creation, and if Christie had put meaningful caps on administrative positions and salaries, it could have made sense.

The moral of the story is, you can't use a hatchet where you need a scalpel!!!