History repeats itself — unfortunately

Forty years ago, we had a soaring inflation rate, obscene gas prices and interest rates in the teens.

Today, thanks to their incredible incompetence, bad policies and serial stupidity, the Democrats in Washington are bringing back all those problems.

It's getting so bad, I'm actually beginning to think Jimmy Carter was not such a bad president after all.

People younger than 40 have no idea how bad things were in the late 1970s under Carter.

They've grown up knowing only 3% interest rates, dirt cheap gasoline and 2% inflation.

They don't know how miserable things were under Carter or how miserable they can get again under Joe Biden.

My friend who owns a local tire store in Los Angeles doesn't need a history book to remember how awful America was in the early 1980s because he lived through it.

When I got an oil change at his place last week, he was railing about how today's official inflation rate of 8.5% doesn't come close to the real figure.

"Where is the thing I'm buying that's only gone up eight and a half?" he asked.

"The tires I'm buying aren't only up eight and a half percent. The gas and food I'm buying are not only up eight and half."

He's right, and you don't have to be Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to know it.

Early last week, when the new monthly inflation figures came out, Manchin, arguably the last sensible Democrat with an elected job in Washington, rattled off some of the real numbers.

Year over year, gasoline is up 48%. Beef is up 16%, chicken and milk up 13% and coffee and eggs up 11%.

Used car prices are up nearly 40% — and the wait to get a new one feels almost as long as it was in 1981 Moscow.

Democrats have created our economic and social problems themselves — in just 14 months — but they always try to blame them on bad or greedy other people.

They say that if the rich would just pay more in taxes — their so-called "fair share" — ordinary people will somehow be better off, as if the additional taxes the rich are forced to pay will go directly to needy people.

But the reality is, as the last 75 years have proven again and again, Democrat policies always hurt the poor and middle class the hardest, not the rich.

For example, I have a Ford F-150 pickup and with gas in California going for almost $6 a gallon it costs me nearly $200 for a fill up.

I can afford that, but my daughter-the-school-teacher can't. Neither can my son, who has two young girls.

Neither can the grocery clerk or the waiter at a restaurant — but the owners of the grocery store chain or the restaurant can.

The last good Democrat president was Bill Clinton. He balanced the budget, gave us welfare reform and actually worked well with Republicans, but we'll never see his like again.

Today, we're watching the usual Democrat horror story playing out with the added bonus of a president who does everything backward.

President Biden, following the Democrat playbook, blames Vladimir Putin, the rich and gouging oil company CEOs for high gas prices — anyone but his administration, which caused them by shutting down pipelines and generally abusing America's productive energy sector.

Given the way the Democrats are governing in D.C. now, things will never change for the better unless a miracle happens.

That's what happened in 1980 when Ronald Reagan came to Washington and turned things around by lowering taxes, cutting government regulations and lifting the country's spirits.

To many of us old-timers, it feels like the early 1980s all over again.

And the only way the country will ever recover from the damage of the Biden Gang is to elect a Republican worthy of being president.

Thank God there will be many candidates.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.