Jimmy Carter @ 100

[Valin]

Power Line

Steven Haywad

Oct. 1 2024

To say I was not a fan of Jimmy Carter would be an understatement, but today he turns 100. In comparison to Biden and the progressive death grip on today’s Democratic Party, he looks a whole lot better in retrospect. Cy Vance, Harold Brown, and Zbigniew Brzezinski were head and shoulders above Biden’s senior foreign and defense policy appointees Blinken, Austin, and Sullivan.

It is possible to speak well of some of Carter’s deeds (as Phil Gramm does today in the Wall Street Journal), such as deregulating or partially deregulating transportation and other basic sectors of the economy. Here’s a chart of some of Carter’s deregulatory actions and results:

(Snip)

This chart leaves out Carter’s greatest deregulatory act, however. He deregulated beer. Almost a decade ago, when I was fiddling around with video production before taking up podcasting, I came up with this tribute to Carter’s beer deregulation, and one of the early gems of the time—Billy Beer: