Leave it to the New York Times to turn a book review of a biography of Calvin Coolidge (Coolidge, by Amity Shlaes, who is a friend of mine) into an attack on President Reagan, but sure enough, toward the end of Jacob Heilbrunn's review of the book comes this: "The bogus nostrums that Coolidge touted have directly led either to enormous deficits during the Reagan era or to outright catastrophe during the Bush era."
Hmm. Let's look at those "enormous deficits" of the Reagan era. According to the White House Office of Management and Budget, they looked like this:
| Year | Deficit in Current Dollars | Deficit as Percent of GDP |
| 1981 | 79 billion | 2.6 |
| 1982 | 128 billion | 4.0 |
| 1983 | 208 billion | 6.0 |
| 1984 | 185 billion | 4.8 |
| 1985 | 212 billion | 5.1 |
| 1986 | 221 billion | 5.0 |
| 1987 | 150 billion | 3.2 |
| 1988 | 155 billion | 3.1 |
Were those deficits the result of President Reagan following Coolidge's practice of cutting tax rates? No; in fact federal tax receipts grew under the Reagan administration, to $909 billion in 1988 from $599 billion in 1981. The big driver of the deficit under Reagan wasn't tax cuts, which if anything by spawning growth helped reduce the deficit; the big driver of the deficit under Reagan was defense spending, which nearly doubled to $290 billion in 1988 from $158 billion in 1981 (it had been $134 billion in 1980). That was a bet on winning the Cold War that ultimately paid off in a big way, but that has next to nothing to do with Coolidge. Reagan could have had a zero deficit in his final year had he simply kept defense spending at Carter levels.
Meanwhile, let's have a look, for comparison's sake, at the deficits under President Obama, as reported by the same source, the White House Office of Management and Budget:
| Year | Deficit in Current Dollars | Deficit as a Percent of GDP |
| 2009 | $1.4 trillion | 10.1 |
| 2010 | $1.3 trillion | 9.0 |
| 2011 | $1.3 trillion | 8.7 |
Funny how you don't often see the Times referring to Mr. Obama's deficits as "enormous." Yet both in current dollars and as a percent of GDP, they are considerably larger than those of the Reagan administration. At least the Times hasn't yet found a way to blame the current deficits on President Coolidge.