Economic policies and actions in the Reagan administration

Discussions of the Reagan administration's economic policy often make the assumption, implicitly perhaps, that the administration came into office with a plan or policy. If we mean by policy what economists usually mean, that there was a specified or planned path, contingent on events—a set of rules or medium-term strategies to guide fiscal and monetary actions—there is little evidence that the administration had an economic policy. This is not simply a failure of the Reagan administration. The same criticism would apply to the fiscal and monetary actions of other administrations for the past twenty years or more.