In Size and Risk, Biden’s Opening Gamble Ranks With Reagan’s

Not since Ronald Reagan’s presidency has a new administration opened with a gamble as large as the one in which President Biden is now engaged.

In Mr. Reagan’s case, the gamble took the form of a giant tax cut and a similarly large increase in defense spending, undertaken simultaneously in his first year, 1981. Together those steps defied economic and political conventional wisdom. They also amounted to an effort to change not just policies but the path of the country. When journalist Laurence Barrett wrote a book about those days,...