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Show Attack on Reagan unfair; economic plans good ris k For unparalleled efforts to end inflation and restore the nation's economic health, President Ronald Reagan is being attacked as an ogre out to skin everyday Americans and shaft the poor and elderly. Ironically leading the pack are many of the same persons whose reckless red-ink spending, mountainous moun-tainous deficits and astronomic borrowing have wrecked the dollar, wiped out savings, driven interest in-terest rates sky-high, stagnated much of the economy and driven so many middle-income and poor people to the wall. It takes gall for those economic sinners now to pose as saints eager to save the country. They had endless chances to rescue the Republic during decades of riding high in Congress and the federal bureaucracy. They didn't. Now the sorry task of undoing the damage of decades of misgovernment falls to President Reagan. Politically he has nothing to gain, and he risks losing everything. Comparing the first months of the Reagan administration ad-ministration with the onset of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal can be misleading. FDR asked a Democratic Congress for emergency acts to escape from the Great Depression. He got them. But the emergency acts become permanent. Government, spending, deficits, taxes and controls grew beyond reason. The economy got sick. The nation drifted toward state socialism. President Reagan is trying to turn the country around, cut taxes, cut spending, cut deficits, cut controls, restore confidence, stabilize the curency, stimulate investment and growth to generate jobs, and return America to the current of freedom, opportunity and productivity that made it great. The ills are more subtle than those of the early 1930s. Today's ills are ills of big government, ills rooted in policies camouflaged as panaceas. Even some former supporters are deserting Mr. Reagan. GOP artisans warn he is trying to do too much, going too far. Indeed the President and his people are like the Light Brigade charging into the valley. They could be wiped out politically. But if they do not risk it, the country may sink into incurable stagnation. So they risk it. That takes courage. (Reprinted from the Indianapolis Star) |