Calvin Coolidge for President

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WSJ:

Silent Cal was an "economic general" who cut taxes and produced a run of surpluses.

ROBERT MERRY

2/8/13

 

'Debt takes its Toll.' Thus does Amity Shlaes begin her biography of Calvin Coolidge, the laconic, flinty-faced New Englander who became America's 30th president upon the death of Warren Harding in 1923 and then captured the office in his own right in 1924. Ms. Shlaes, the author of a best-selling history of the Great Depression, "The Forgotten Man" (2007), issues her debt admonition in the course of introducing Oliver Coolidge, a brother of Silent Cal's great-grandfather, who went to jail in 1849 because he couldn't pay a $29.48 debt to a neighbor. She then glides briskly from Oliver's plight to the problem of government debt, particularly when it reaches proportions that threaten the public fisc and undermine national confidence. "There have been times," Ms. Shlaes writes in the introduction to "Coolidge," "when debt pinned down the United States as it once pinned down Oliver.''

 

Calvin Coolidge lived in such a time—as do we. At the end of World War I, the national debt stood at $27 billion, nine times its level before the war. But Coolidge, and Harding as well, slashed the country's credit obligation to just $17.65 billion. They did it by cutting taxes, generating economic growth and, in the process, flooding federal coffers with surplus dollars. This accomplishment merits attention today, with the national debt exceeding $16 trillion—more than 70% of gross domestic product. If that number hits 90%, some economists warn, it will squeeze the national economy inexorably.

 

And if that crisis hits, the country will face a binary choice. It can return to a free-market system of lower taxes, smaller government and the curtailment of the Federal Reserve's promiscuous fiat monetary policies—in short, abandoning Keynesian sensibilities and the trend toward European-style social democratic governance. Or it can opt for what energy-industry executive Jay Zawatsky has called "increasing financial repression"—further federal spending and intrusion into the economy, rising tax rates on the wealthy, ever greater federal debt financed by Fed money creation and, eventually, rising inflation.

 

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Coolidge

Amity Shlaes

 

Release date: February 12, 2013

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Playlist

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Interview: Amity Shlaes Discusses Coolidge (With Transcript)

Ed Driscoll

2/11/13

 

Columnist and author Amity Shlaes stops by for a half-hour interview to discuss Coolidge, her new sequel — or perhaps prequel is the better word — to The Forgotten Man, her best-selling look at the 1930s. The latter book shed new light on the Depression, by exploring its “Forgotten Men” — the entrepreneurs and employees whose lives were up-ended by the destructive “Progressive” policies of first Herbert Hoover, and then FDR.

 

Coolidge places the Roaring ‘20s into context by focusing on the man who helped make them possible, by getting out of the way. Silent Cal was the only president who ever said, “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.” And along the way, as Amity mentions in our interview, “He was in office more than one presidential term. And when he left that office, the federal budget was lower than when he came in. Real, nominal — with vanilla sprinkles on top. Wow, how’d he do that?”

 

How indeed? During our wide-ranging interview, Shlaes discusses such topics as:

 

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