In September, Phil Gramm wrote at The Wall Street Journal:
Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 on Oct. 1, doesn’t get enough credit for the quarter-century economic boom from 1983 to 2008 and the underlying resilience of the economy since. Without Mr. Carter’s deregulation of airlines, trucking, railroads, energy and communications, America might not have had the ability to diversify its economy and lead the world in high-tech development when our postwar domination of manufacturing ended in the late 1970s. The Carter deregulation helped fuel the Reagan economic renaissance and continues to make possible the powerful innovations that remake our world.
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The Airlines Deregulation Act of 1978, the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 unleashed competition and spawned the invention and innovation that gave America the world’s most efficient transportation and distribution system. The cost of flying a mile declined by half and air travel became a mainstay of American life. The logistical cost of moving goods shrank as a share of gross domestic product by 50%. The leader of that effort, recently retired FedEx CEO Fred Smith, describes Mr. Carter’s “underappreciated leadership” as follows: “The reduction of logistics costs in the late 20th century was profound, largely unreported and underappreciated. These farsighted changes were the great achievement of the Carter presidency.”