Gingrich Calls for Return to the Reagan Years

A few weeks ago, Newt Gingrich said that if people doubt his ability to win the election, they should look at Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory over President Carter.

Now, he’s also saying skeptical voters should have faith in his economic policies because they’ve worked before—for Reagan.

“This [economic] nightmare will not end until Reagan-era economic policies are restored,” Gingrich wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Thursday. “If they are, within a year the American economy will take off on another historic boom.”

Reagan put in place income tax rate cuts, regulatory reforms, and spending controls when he took office. Gingrich’s economic plan includes a reduction in the federal business tax rate to 12.5 percent, an optional 15 percent flat tax on personal income, the establishment of a price rule by the Federal Reserve, regulatory and entitlement reform, and the repeal of President Obama’s health care reform.

Arthur Laffer, who was a member of Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board, will be in Iowa to endorse Gingrich, the GOP hopeful said in a Thursday morning appearance on Fox & Friends.

“We're very excited to have someone his caliber to verify that the economic plan I have will create millions of new jobs and get the economy moving again,” Gingrich said.

It’s not just economic policies Reagan did right, in Gingrich’s eyes. The United States should also look to the 1980s for guidance in its Middle East policies.

“The right strategy in the Gulf is to replace the current Iranian regime,” he told Fox & Friends. “And the right way to do that is what Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher did, which is create a strategy not primarily military but primarily psychological, political, economic.”

Gingrich called Iranian nuclear weapons a “mortal threat” to the United States and said concerns over Iran reducing the oil flow to the rest of the world was “the best possible argument” for the U.S. creating its own surplus of energy through offshore drilling, and developing coal, wind, solar, nuclear and biofuels technologies.

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