Former President Ronald Reagan's famed top economic advisor Arthur B. Laffer has slammed President Joe Biden's approach to inflation as 'exactly the opposite' of what is needed to tame soaring consumer prices, speaking to DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.
On Wednesday, new federal data showed the consumer price index hit a 7 percent annual gain in December, the fastest increase since June 1982, when Reagan was fighting to rein in soaring inflation.
Reagan swept into office in the 1980 election on his vow to contain inflation, which had hit a staggering 14 percent that year under President Jimmy Carter.
'Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man,' Reagan famously said on the campaign trail, and voters responded to the message, delivering him a mandate to take decisive action.
Reagan's economic approach had four key pillars: reducing taxes, cutting non-defense government spending, slashing regulations, and tightening the money supply with stricter central bank policy.
Critics derided the plan, but on balance it worked, and inflation returned to single digits in the first year of Reagan's term, hit a reasonable 2.5 percent in August 1983, and remained below 5 percent for his remaining years in office.
'It was exactly the reverse of what happening with Biden and the current era,' said Laffer, 81, in a phone interview from his offices in Nashville. 'The polices are exactly the opposite, so the results are the opposite.'
'While Reagan healed the sick, Biden has infected the healthy. While Reagan cured inflation, Biden is creating inflation,' he added.
Former President Ronald Reagan's famed top economic advisor Arthur B. Laffer (seen with Reagan in 1978) has slammed President Joe Biden's approach to inflation as 'exactly the opposite' of what is needed to tame soaring consumer prices
On Wednesday, new federal data showed the consumer price index hit a 7 percent annual gain in December, the fastest increase since June 1982, when Reagan was fighting to rein in soaring inflation
Inflation under Reagan (blue) is seen in reverse chronological order compared to the rate under Biden. 'Biden's economy will look like the Reagan film played backwards,' he says
Laffer, who served as a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, is best known as a pioneer of supply-side economics, and promoter of the Laffer Curve, which holds that in some cases reducing taxes can increase government revenue, by stimulating growth.
Known as the 'Great Inflation', the period from 1965 to 1982 was marked by soaring inflation that topped 14 percent by 1980. Reagan took office in January 1981 and his strict policies helped drive down price increases
Critics called his theories 'voodoo economics,' a label he dismisses with a laugh and says that history has clearly proven wrong.
Laffer points to sharp differences between Reagan's policies and Biden's as the key driver of current high inflation.
'Biden's economy will look like the Reagan film played backwards: higher inflation, larger deficits, slower growth, falling participation rates, greater poverty, and weaker defense,' wrote Laffer in a recent research note from his consultancy Laffer Associates, which he shared with DailyMail.com.
He added: 'the U.S. economy is beginning to experience a reversal of the exceptional results inherited by President Biden just as drastic as the terrible results experienced in the late 1970s and early 1980s.'
'Biden has grown into the
