Many Happy Returns...

I was traveling Friday and unfortunately missed the chance to note a happy anniversary. Friday was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ronald Reagan as the fortieth President of the United States of America. You could easily make an argument that the most important President of the twentieth century was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and you’d probably be right. However, I don’t think there is any argument over who was second, and in the category of favorites (at least for me) first, and that is Ronald Reagan.

There was a great op-ed piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Still Morning in America.”:

“Perhaps the greatest tribute to the success of Reaganomics is that, over the course of the past 276 months, the U.S. economy has been in recession for only 15. That is to say, 94% of the time the U.S. economy has been creating jobs (43 million in all) and wealth ($30 trillion). More wealth has been created in the U.S. in the last quarter-century than in the previous 200 years. The policy lessons of this supply-side prosperity need to be constantly relearned, lest we return to the errors that produced the 1970s.”

I was in the Boston Museum of Science this weekend and happened past an exhibit on the ever changing population of the United States. The current population of the United States is estimated at just over 297 million people. People are being born at rate faster than they our dying in the country, but statistics that most interested me dealt with choice. Every 38 seconds someone in the world immigrates to the United States. The statistic for people emigrating, or moving away from the United States, was one every 137 seconds (it may have been 178 or 187 – should have written it down).

What the statistics above tell me is that when a decision is based on choice – where to live, the United States has a net gain of people voting “with their feet” to live here. It would be interesting to compare these numbers with those of other nations, especially those that are often held up as better at this or that than the United States.

Rightly or wrongly, in my heart of hearts I still believe in the United States as the land of opportunity. Not perfect in any way, but definitely the fairest, the most hopeful, and always representative of any honest, hard-working person’s best chance. I love Ronald Reagan not just for his numerous accomplishments (say…saving the entire world from Nuclear Holocaust- gotta love that one!), but because he never stopped believing in America. Ronald Reagan, more than any other President in the twentieth century, did the most to hold up the U.S. as the “shining city on a hill,” and to re-introduce Americans to the goodness that is the United States of America.