A Look Back at Reaganomics by Gregory Hilton

Almost 30 years have passed but the left continues to blame Reaganomics, which is what they called the legislation to lower top personal income tax rates from 70 to 28%. The result was a seven year period (1982 to 1989) which saw the greatest, consistent burst of economic activity ever seen in the U.S. In fact, it was the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen – in any country, at any time.
From November 1982, when Reagan’s new economic program was beginning to take effect, to November 1989, 18.7 million new jobs were created. It was a world record: Never before had so many jobs been created during a comparable time period.
The poverty rate also fell steadily. The Federal budget deficits were too high but House Democrats consistently fought the President on domestic spending reductions. Reagan did significantly increase the Pentagon budget but this spending increase made an enormous contribution to the end of the Cold War. The American people delivered a verdict on Reaganomics when the President carried 49 states in his 1984 re-election bid.
Reagan was also the best President our cities ever had. He reformed public housing and helped to destroy the welfare stereotype. He was able to concentrate funding on people in need. He said “We found the overwhelming majority would like nothing better than to be off welfare, with jobs for the future, and out here in the society with the rest of us. The trouble is that bureaucracy has them so economically trapped that there’s no way they can get away. And they’re trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves.”
As Bill Clinton has acknowledged, his welfare reform bill had its origins in the Reagan Administration. The “Fort Apache” section of the South Bronx is now a hot real estate market with brownstones approaching $500,000. Jimmy Carter did visit the South Bronx in 1977 but he had little to do with the area’s revitalization. A major reason for the decline was NYC’s rent-control laws which prevented landlords from raising rents in any substantial way to maintain buildings.
As the vacancy rates rose and buildings deteriorated, landlords saw a new way to compensate for their monetary loses in the early 1970s: arson. The South Bronx lost over 40 percent of its housing stock while the Bronx lost more than 300,000 residents, about half of the total. The recovery began in the Reagan Administration and it involved a private/public partnership. Reaganomics made the private investment possible.

Was Reagan Wrong When He Visited Bitburg? by Gregory Hilton

President Ronald Reagan visited Germany in 1985 for the 40th anniversary of V-E Day and an economic summit. At the invitation of Chancellor Helmut Kohl he visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the closest military cemetery at Bitburg. All German military cemeteries contain at least a few SS graves.
When the press revealed the existence of the SS graves there was considerable pressure to cancel the visit. Chancellor Kohl said, “I will not give up this idea. If we don’t go to Bitburg, if we don’t do what we jointly planned, we will deeply offend the feelings of my people.” A poll demonstrated that 72% of West Germans thought the visit should go forward as planned.
Kohl said rarely had German-American relations been so strained. Reagan’s National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane, wrote: “Once Reagan learned that Kohl would really be badly damaged by a withdrawal, he said ‘We can’t do that; I owe him for the deployment of the Pershing II missile.’” Reagan told his deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver: “I know you and Nancy don’t want me to go through with this, but we have to reconcile.”
I do not believe Reagan was insensitive toward Jews. In “The Reagan Diaries” edited by Douglas Brinkley, the late President demonstrates impressive compassion for Jewish causes.
In his first personal communication with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, for example, Reagan requests that Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky be released from the gulag and permitted to join his wife in Israel. In another episode, after addressing an audience of Holocaust survivors and their children, Reagan remarks: “It was an emotional experience for them & for us. I know I choked up a couple of times.” And even when confronting Jewish groups opposing the sale of the AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia, Reagan strongly affirms his support for Israel: “… it must be plain to them, they’ve never had a better friend of Israel in the W.H. than they have now.”
Elie Wiesel was among the many people who urged Reagan to skip the Bitburg visit. It was Reagan who presented the Congressional Gold Medal to Wiesel that year and they both made long speeches in the East Room of the White House. Wiesel did not want Reagan to go to Bitburg, but he would never accuse the former President of anti-Semitism.
Reagan was not insensitive to Jews and said: “We pledge that he will never forget that in many places of the world, the cancer of anti-Semitism still exists. We must not forget our duty to those who perished, our duty to bring justice to those who perpetrated unspeakable deeds. And we must take action to root out the vestiges of anti-Semitism in America, to quash the violence-prone or hate groups even before they can spread their venom and destruction. And let all of us, Jew and non-Jew alike, pledge ourselves today to the life of the Jewish dream: to a time when war is no more, when all nations live in peace, when each man, woman, and child lives in the dignity that God intended.”