The Seven Fat Years
Bartley, Robert L.
Robert L. Bartley's moderate demeanor and measured prose disguise a true radical who specializes in demolishing myths. He has now delivered an assault on the conventional wisdom whose careful...
...Bartley has only facts and reason to support his thesis, and runs against an interpretation that is ceaselessly propagated by the news media, promoted by Democrats, and glumly confirmed by all too many Republicans...
...His description of these boom years is a desperately needed corrective, one neglected by a Bush Administration that seems determined to forget its Reaganite past...
...Bartley departs from his usual candor in dealing with Journal reporter James Stewart, whose best-selling Den of Thieves is an egregious hatchet job on Milken and a whitewash of the government's prosecutorial excess that is deplored in The Seven Fat Years...
...Contrary to the canard that the Reagan tax cuts had stripped bare the economy, tax receipts actually grew faster than the economy during his tenure...
...policies that climaxed under Jimmy Carter...
...There are more business journals, but not more business journalists...
...bank lending abroad...
...Any setback was exaggerated and even celebrated...
...In the midst of success, American elites were infatuated with failure...
...Under Reagan, the United States "was the wealthiest society on earth, indeed the wealthiest society in the history of mankind...
...Unlike the Bush Administration, Bartley takes on the "fairness" argument, contending that its advocates would have government "protect the losers" when instead it should "reward the winners...
...The supposed trade deficit, Bartley writes, can be self-financed by foreign purchases of U.S...
...Economic progress was denied and its lessons derided...
...Men from privileged backgrounds are not likely to be comfortable arguing that 'fairness' is bunk," he writes, adding that "the social background of the Bush decision-makers is a handicap in dealing with . . . the decline of the entrepreneur...
...International trade statistics are deemed even more spurious...
...The editor of the Wall Street Journal unflinchingly places himself on the side of "the college dropouts, breakaway engineers and illegal immigrants who provided the impetus for the Seven Fat Years" and against the captains of the Fortune 500...
...In contrast to the gloom peddled by today's politicians, Bartley sees the U.S...
...indeed, this has been the historical critique of capitalism itself...
...Most believe they will write about cats in trees and fires and robberies, before graduating to the city hall beat or some foreign bureau, and then moving on to columnist or a spot at Esquire or the New Yorker...
...The proliferation of business publications was another product of the Reagan boom, and it is not over yet...
...It also, he makes clear, delayed the Reagan tax cut so that Chairman Volcker's inflation-killing tight-money policy at the Federal Reserve kicked in two years early and forced an agonizing recession...
...B artley also swallows in part Presi- dent Bush's feeble defense of his 1990 breach of faith on taxes on grounds that he could not afford the turmoil of the alternative—a Gramm-Rudman sequester of funds—at a time when he was preparing for war with Saddam Hussein...
...In The Seven Fat Years, he minimizes the perils of deficit spending, laughs off obsessive concern with the trade balance, disputes the notion that the poor are getting poorer, and even questions the utter villainy of Michael Milken...
...As editor of the Wall Street Journal, Bartley played a vital supporting role in the supply-side movement that made possible the Reagan revolution...
...But Bartley quickly makes amends incharacteristically unequivocal language...
...I'm not holding my breath...
...In trying to bridge the vast ideological gap between the newspaper's editorial columns (which Bartley controls) and its news columns (which Stewart typifies), Bartley in desperation cites as evidence of "Stewart's reportorial honesty" one sentence in the epilogue of Stewart's book that politely "calls into question the wholesale criminalization of the securities laws" after 443 pages of praising that process...
...As the decade progresses, the economy will repeatedly strain at the reins of pessimism and bids ultimately to prevail as economic forces shaped the First Industrial Revolution...
...Statistics intended to show income distribution becoming ever more skewed are "fictitious," neglecting both the distributional effects of government spending and how changes in tax policy will affect taxpayer behavior...
...But for the 1990s, there is a danger...
...All are accused of "consummate greed," but Bartley adds that "capitalism runs on the acquisitive instinct...
...It is difficult to imagine anybody else presenting so thorough and yet engrossing a rebuttal of the conventional wisdom...
...Without that august newspaper lending its prestige, the radical notion of cutting taxes would have lacked credibility...
...Bartley concludes that it is up to America whether it wants another seven fat years...
...The Reagan boom saw the American economy grow by a third, so that "the American economic machine had in effect built a whole new West Germany...
...standing "athwart the world" as it did afRobert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist, a television commentator, and the publisher of the Evans and Novak Political Report...
...He gives the impression that the best way to cut the trade deficit is to stop trying to calculate it, since the figures are removed from reality anyway...
...One would imagine that, just as a shortage of catchers a few years back led some outfielders to don the Tools of Ignorance in hopes of making it to the majors, so would a few sportswriters sit down with a Barron's Dictionary of Banking Terms and prepare to decipher annual reports...
...The business journalist must first master a language that is in most cases designed to elude comprehension, then translate it into something approximating Joe Mysak is editor and publisher of the Bond Buyer and chief saloon correspondent of The American Spectator...
...It is no trivial problem, as described by Bartley: As the 1990s dawned...
...Over the short run of a decade or so, a kind of pessimism can become self-realizing...
...ter World War II, with the promise of not only another seven fat years but "a new golden age...
...B artley is most daring in assailing the conventional wisdom about "greed," not only during the seven fat years but throughout American history:He asserts that Jay Gould and Samuel Insull, stigmatized as blackguards, in fact embodied the American entrepreneurial spirit...
...Bush is the product of "Republican bloodlines," as are his principal lieutenants in government...
...D eficit mania, Bartley writes, "may lead us to do dumb things, like trying to fight recessions by increasing taxes"—as Bush did in 1990 to end the seven fat years...
...Bartley suggests that Milken's "biggest mistake was to threaten entrenched financial interests, above all the jobs of corporate chieftains...
...He has now delivered an assault on the conventional wisdom whose careful reading would benefit politicians in general and Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, and George Bush in particular...
...The critics include supposed pillars of capitalism: Cornelius Vanderbilt against Gould, the Morgan circle against Insull...
...The deficit is a "grossly overrated" statistic that affects neither interest rates nor investment and is no measure of a burden left to our children...
...the economic thrust was momentarily checked by curious political and psychological forces...
...Does it really deplore a decade of greed and seek atonement in a decade of envy...
...For the nation shall also have its way if seven lean years is what it truly wants...
...B artley sets the beginning of the fat years—actually seven years, eight months—in 1983, when Reagan's tax cut belatedly took effect, after being delayed for two years by deficit-obsessed administration officials and members of Congress...
...a bit hesitatingly, he puts Michael Milken in the same category...
...The problem is that so few political leaders understand that we have this choice, and none of them is running for President...
...They believe it with a naïveté that is touching, but the fact is that, during the 1990s, what jobs remain in the shrinking field of print journalism will be in business writing, in one fashion or another...
...Deficit mania, he makes clear, blurs the purpose for which the money is borrowed—there's a qualitative difference between spending on infrastructure that will last for decades and spending on socially corrosive welfare handouts...
...To avert this danger, Bartley attempts to dislodge false notions that have become holy writ, thanks to the false prophets headed by David Stockman...
...He sets the end in 1990, when George Bush told the American people they should no longer read his lips because he would increase taxes...
...Most important, he defends the prosperity—"the fat years" that began under President Reagan and ended under President Bush—which has been so vigorously defamed by Democrats and so poorly defended by Republicans...
...The United States will have forsaken the birthright of history...
...Once the bogus numbers are plugged in, "the test of fairness is not whether the top fifth of taxpayers THE SEVEN FAT YEARS: AND HOW TO DO IT AGAIN Robert L. Bartley The Free Press/347 pages/$29.95 reviewed by ROBERT D. NOVAK The American Spectator August 1992 53 pay more tax, but whether they pay a larger percentage of their income...
...Very few people go into journalism thinking they are going to write about finance...
...Now, in his first book, Bartley faces a more daunting task: to remind Americans that the economic policies of Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker saved the nation and the West from economic disasters caused by calamitous U.S...
...Milken is described as "ensnared by far larger social forces and resentments, like Gould and Insull before him...
...he asks...
...securities and reduced U.S...
...He poses a grim alternative: "If the nation allows itself to slip back to the failed policies and crabbed attitudes that led to the crisis of the '70s, it will stumble economically and wither spiritually...
Vol. 25 • August 1992 • No. 8
