budget, since deficit spending encourages destructive inflation.
The Reagan revolution turned on three major policies: a reduction in government regulation of commerce and industry; aggressive budget cutting; aggressive tax cutting-not for middle-and lower-income individuals, but for the wealthy and for businesses. Reducing the tax burden on the rich was supposed to free up more money for investment, the benefits of which would ultimately “trickle down” to the less well off in the form of more and better jobs.
If trickle down was a hard concept for many to swallow, Reagan’s insistence that a reduction in tax rates would actually increase government revenues seemed downright bizarre to some. When Ronald Reagan and the man who would be his vice president, George Bush, were battling one another in the Republican primaries, Bush branded the notion voodoo economics—a phrase that would come back to haunt Bush in subsequent campaigns. But conservative economist Arthur Laffer (b. 1940) theorized that tax cuts would stimulate increased investment and savings, thereby ultimately increasing taxable income and generating more revenue. President Reagan made frequent reference to the “Laffer Curve,” which illustrated this process.
Plausible or not, a majority of the American people were prepared to take the leap with their new president. In 1981, a bold program was hurried through a sometimes bewildered Congress, including a major tax cut, a staggering $43 billion cut in the budget for domestic programs, and broad cutbacks in environmental and business regulation. The “Great Communicator” overcame all resistance. When catastrophe struck on March 30, 1981, in the form of would-be assassin John Hinckley, Jr., the 70-year-old president’s calm and heroic response to his having been shot in the chest drew even more support for his programs.
Greed Is Good
A relatively small number of people made a lot of money as a result of Reaganomics. Most of the new wealth was generated not by the stimulated production that the supply-side theory promised, but by a frenzied crescendo of corporate acquisitions and mergers. The stock market buzzed and churned in a way that (for some) disturbingly recalled the late 1920s. Companies were bought and either merged for efficiency (with resulting loss of jobs) or broken up, their component parts and assets sold at a profit to stockholders (with resulting loss of jobs). Unemployment generated by the high-level financial manipulations of the 1980s was hard on the man and woman on the street, but the movement of masses of wealth benefitted those who could afford to invest in the right companies at the right time. The average American may have been raised to believe that businesses existed to make products and provide employment, but the manipulators of wealth insisted that companies existed exclusively to enrich investors, and if that meant destroying a company, breaking it up, so be it. In the words of Gordon Gecko, a fictional tycoon played by Michael Douglas in the popular movie “Wall Street” (1987), “Greed is good.”
Early confidence in Reaganomics faltered when the recession of the Nixon-Ford-Carter years deepened further, and public-opinion polls began to suggest that many people believed the tax cuts had benefited only the rich. Inflation did roll back, though interest rates remained high, as did unemployment. However, by 1983, acquisitions, mergers, and arbitrage had made the stock market a very active place, and prices began to rise sharply. This change, combined with relatively low inflation and (at last) rising production, as well as slowly decreasing unemployment, happily portended recovery.
What hopeful observers tended to ignore was the prodigiously growing national debt—under a president whose economic theory called for a balanced budget—and the flimsy sources of the profits being turned on Wall Street. Arbitrage is a high-risk business, which is made less risky if one has inside information, special knowledge of impending mergers, for example. The trouble is that such inside trading is illegal, and beginning in 1985, Wall Street was rocked by a series of massive insider trading scandals. Trader Dennis B. Levine pleaded guilty to making $12.6 million by trading on non-public information, and arbitrageur Ivan Boesky likewise admitted buying huge blocks of stock as a result of receiving inside information. Not all the money made on Wall Street was illegal, but much of it rested on very shaky ground.
To finance the buyout of companies, traders turned to junk bonds, high-risk investments (usually issued by a company without an established earnings history or burdened by poor credit) acquired cheaply and paying a high rate of interest. Such transactions, called leveraged buyouts (the takeover of a company financed by borrowed funds) were pioneered in the 1970s, by the Wall Street firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and brought to a point of frenzy by Michael R. Milken. Often, junk bonds were purchased with very little hope that the issuing company would ever repay the loan, but in the short run, interest payments were so high that the underlying “junkiness” of the bond hardly seemed to matter.
Black Monday
The junk being bought and sold hit the fan on October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average (key measure of stock market performance) plunged 508 points—almost double the fall in the 1929 crash that brought on the Great Depression. As Herbert Hoover had assured the American public that “prosperity was just around the comer,” President Reagan dismissed the crash as “some people grabbing profits.” Fortunately, the market gradually recovered—but the high-flying era of Reaganomics had careened to a gut-wrenching end.
“Gay Plaque” and a Blind Eye
While many Americans stared with envy, admiration, or disgust at the Wall Street roller coaster, they turned a blind eye to the growing legion of homeless people who haunted the nation’s large cities and even many of its smaller towns. Certainly, the Reagan administration, having drastically cut back federal welfare funding, did little enough for America’s poorest. The administration likewise turned away from a terrifying plague that developed initially among homosexual men but was soon also diagnosed in heterosexual men, in women, and in children.
Throughout the 1980s, grass-roots AIDS organizations—including, most notably, Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)—mobilized. The organizations accused the government of failing to respond to an epidemic perceived to affect socially marginal groups—homosexuals and intravenous drug abusers (who contract the disease by sharing hypodermic needles tainted with infected blood). President Reagan failed. even to make public mention of the disease until April 1987, fully six years after health officials had determined that the epidemic was under way. Only through the efforts of AIDS activists was federal funding increased—from $5.6 million in 1982 to more than $2 billion a decade later.
“Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!”
If the Reagan administration did not engage AIDS vigorously, it did not hesitate to take on the Soviet Union, assuming an aggressive stance against what the president called “an evil empire.” Defense spending was dramatically stepped up, dwarfing domestic budget cuts in welfare and other programs.
The president also acted Aggressively to meet perceived military threats throughout the world, sending U.S. marines in the summer of 1982 to Lebanon as a peacekeeping force. On October 23, 1983, more than 200 of these troops were killed in their sleep when a truck laden with 25,000 pounds of TNT was driven into the marines’ Beirut headquarters building. Just two days after this disaster, the president ordered an invasion of the island nation of Grenada in the West Indies. Cuban troops had been sent to the tiny country (population 110,100) at the behest of its anti-American dictatorship, and the president was determined to protect the approximately 1,000 U.S. citizens there. The president also saw a successful liberation of the country as a kind of emotional compensation for the death of the marines in Beirut.
