"Under pressure from Wall Street, Carter reluctantly appointed Paul Volcker to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1979. Volcker had been under secretary of the Treasury for Richard Nixon and was then serving as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. However, it is naïve to think that Volcker was given a free hand by Carter. His inability to fully implement a tight-money policy is why the inflation rate fell only to 12.5 percent in 1980, despite a sharp recession that year.
It was only after the election, when Volcker knew that Carter had lost, that he really clamped down on the money supply. This illustrates an important point: Presidents get the Fed policy they want, no matter how “independent” the Fed may be. If there had been any doubt about this, it was settled in 1967, when Fed chairman William McChesney Martin buckled under pressure from Lyndon Johnson and eased monetary policy even though Martin knew he should have tightened it. This caused inflation to jump from 3 percent in 1967 to 4.7 percent in 1968 and 6.2 percent in 1969.
It is not now remembered how much pressure there was on Reagan to get rid of Volcker and have the Fed run a more accommodative monetary policy. Yet he not only supported Volcker publicly, he appointed like-minded people to the Fed whenever he had the chance. He reappointed Volcker to the chairmanship in 1983 and appointed Alan Greenspan to replace him in 1987."
from http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_b...0406140846.asp
The point, however, is that the high national unemployment in Reagan's first term was an unavoidable consequence of tight monetary policy, the only known way to squeeze double digit inflation out of the system. Reagan policies also caused depression-era levels of unemployment here in Houston twenty-five years ago when he induced the Saudis to glut the oil market to the detriment of the Soviet economy. I almost went broke from that, and many of my friends did go broke, but it was in a good cause: economic warfare against our sworn enemy (then), the friggin' commies. So, yeah, Ronaldus' policies did create unemployment...for the sake of the greater good: stopping inflation and commies.
Now what greater good does Obama pursue with his unemployment-engendering policies? Spread the wealth around? The only greater good I can envision is entirely within his own mind: the destruction of capitalism. Either that, or he's a fucking idiot.