President Reagan’s administration was the first in half a century where the government share of the economy decreased, as he slashed the growth rate of government while the economy swelled. Mr. Reagan used executive orders and administrative changes to abolish onerous regulations and obstacles to private business, such as abolishing the government censorship regime falsely labeled the “Fairness Doctrine.”

And Ronald Reagan tried to do more. He sought to privatize the Energy Department and the FAA, and to tackle federal spending and entitlements. But the U.S. House was controlled by a liberal Democrat majority, and the Senate never had a conservative majority, thanks to alternating years of Democrat control or moderate Republican control.

Again in contrast, President Obama is doing the opposite. He proposes almost a trillion dollars over the next two years to begin a government takeover the healthcare industry, which would doom us to the same substandard care that other nations have as government bureaucrats start making medical research and treatment decisions that they are utterly incompetent to make. He is also moving to restructure the energy industry, takeover the financial industry, have political hacks run the housing market, and pump countless billions more into the auto industry to pay back the big union bosses.

The final economic contrast is federalism. President Reagan strived to empower our fifty sovereign states. He understood that issues such as military matters, national security and diplomacy must be run by the federal government, but most matters are best left to the states. The best example of this is educating our children, where President Reagan tried to decimate the Department of Education and return control of schools to states and local school boards.

President Obama, by contrast, is using this falsely-named “stimulus” bill to create vast new government bureaucracies in the states, mandated by the federal government and overriding the states’ discretion in many areas.

So the Obama cheerleading squad (the mainstream media) can compare him to Ronald Reagan all day long, but the truth is the President Obama is the anti-Reagan, and his policies will bring us the same unemployment and stagnant economies that exist in the European countries that try these failed socialist policies, rather than the prosperity the real Ronald Reagan brought to America.