Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris

Author:Edmund Morris [Morris, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307791429
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-05T05:00:00+00:00

Sadat laughed along with us, his teeth flashing Nubian-white beneath the swart mustache. There were no jokes, however, when he made his return of toast—a long, grim speech reminding the President of his moral duty to recognize the Palestinian Arabs.

The next day, Reagan flew west on vacation. Two items of official business awaited him at Rancho del Cielo: his budget and tax bills, finally ready for signature. Richard Darman, aware that the bills would begin to accumulate darkening deficits the moment Reagan signed them, was sardonically amused to see fog cottoning the valley at the appointed hour, 10:30 A.M., August 13. What had begun eight months before as a radiance of pure numbers in David Stockman’s calculator brain had been dulled by so many political IOUs that nobody really knew just how many billions of debit the President was about to visit on the Treasury.

There was no doubt, however, that Reagan and his economic aides had brought about the largest spending-control bill, and the largest tax reduction, in American history. Their budget was revolutionary in that it reversed—or, more properly, inversed—an economic theory dating back to the first days of the New Deal. Hallowed by Franklin Roosevelt, intellectualized by John Maynard Keynes, trumpeted by John Kenneth Galbraith, and codified by the social engineers of the Sixties and Seventies, the theory called for high, progressive tax rates, manipulative government spending, welfare-state “entitlements” centering around Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, plus forcible downward redistribution of wealth and capital. “Reaganomics”—to use an unavoidable new catchphrase—questioned the wisdom of all these tenets, with the exception of Social Security, by now clearly too much of an article of American faith even to be debated.

Reporters and cameramen gathering for this morning’s misty signing ceremony did not know that Stockman was now saying, to the President’s face, that Reaganomics was bad math. The equation OMB had been charged with in January (taxes down, defense up, no inflation, no deficit) was simply unworkable, in the face of Congress’s rewriting of the spending bill and Secretary Weinberger’s absolute refusal to slow the arms buildup—not to mention a standing $300 billion and counting in annual entitlements. Among all the millions of numbers that had been processed through Stockman’s computers, the latest was the most depressing: a fiscal 1982 deficit of $60 billion, which recession would only worsen.

There the two bills lay, at any rate, and here in blue jeans came the President to sign them with twenty-four different pens. Stroke by stroke in the mist, Reagan reduced the income-tax burden on individual Americans by almost a third, or $280 billion over the next three years, and saved them a further $130 billion in federal spending. Darman watched with the beginnings of guilt for having let him get so far and presumably understand so little of the negative consequences of what he was doing: farm foreclosures, shut hospitals, dirty schools, dirty air.

Many years later, Darman would list no fewer than ten reasons for the legitimization of Reaganomics, ranging from a disillusionment with tax-and-spend liberalism to brilliant White House liaison work and Congressional confusion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.