What we admirers of Reagan don't like to remember, though, is that, beginning in 1983, the Federal Reserve began inflating again. Yes, the tax cuts certainly did spur the economy, but cheap credit supported by newly-printed money really turbocharged it.
That particular bubble ended with the Savings and Loan debacle. Eventually we inflated our way out of that mess, too.
I haven’t studied the M-1 numbers so I can’t say. I do know that the S&L bubble was in part-—not entirely-—caused by FSLIC incentives to be extremely risky because the difference between interest rates and what mortgages were paying (”disintermediation”) was GUARANTEEING the S&Ls would fail at some point, so why not be risky sooner with the hope of making the institutions solvent?
The Fed’s reflation, the Garn-St Germaine Act that led to the S&L debacle, the subprime mortgage mess of the last decade, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, TARP, and QEx were all bipartisan projects.
The GOP is just as bad as the Democrats when it comes to such issues. Nixon didn’t really say, “We’re all Keynesians now”, but he did take the US off the gold standard and mandate wage and price controls.