RIP

The thirty-ninth president of the United States, James Earl Carter, is being laid to rest today. He passed December 29, 2024 at the age of 100, making him the longest lived of US presidents yet.

Don’t look to the legacy media for solid perspective on his presidency. One ostensibly serious television outlet for instance is featuring commentary from a parade of young women who couldn’t possibly have been adults at the time, many of whom likely weren’t even born yet. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of people around who are not only well versed in economic and political history but who also actually remember what it was like trying to manage a household budget at the time.

Why have only people who have studied it when you can have people who have both studied it and lived it? It’s not the aim of this post to provide a complete analysis of the Carter years, but with literally hours and ample resources to devote to the subject, there’s no excuse for professional media do so poorly.

Carter has often been rated as one of the least effective presidents. I think it’s a bad rap. The economic “malaise” and inflation that dominated the Carter years was largely a product of previous administrations, especially the Johnson administration.

The fact that the effect of a policy outlives its executor is widely unacknowledged. Associating an economic outcome with the president in office at the time is standard but shallow analysis. The fact that deficits accumulated under a president don’t disappear when he leaves office invalidates any such superficial assumption. Johnson guns and butter debts were certainly still there when Carter took office. The attempt to monetize them, along with the closing of the gold window under Nixon, was the main cause of the inflation.

Carter’s share of the blame arises from ineffective responses, ranging from urging people lower their thermostats to 68° to a federal 55 mph speed limit. Presidents don’t have to be economists, but should at least be able to evaluate the caliber the economic advice they receive.

Carter’s great economic accomplishment was to appoint Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. Had he given Volcker the political cover to do what he needed to do rather than making him wait for the next administration, his economic record might be remembered much more favorably.