cover image The Seven Fat Years: And How to Do It Again

The Seven Fat Years: And How to Do It Again

Robert L. Bartley. Free Press, $22.95 (347pp) ISBN 978-0-02-901915-3

Wall Street Journal editor Bartley here extols economic policies of the Reagan years and calls for more of the same. Tracing the pre-Reagan ``stagflation'' produced by Nixon's price controls, Ford's WIN campaign and Carter's ``voluntary'' price guidelines, the author tracks how 1980s tax cuts and deregulation, combined with Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker's inflation-curbing money controls, unleashed American enterprise and boosted national production 30% with a 20% rise in per capita income. In extraordinary detail, and with frequent ironical jabs at the ``unenlightened,'' Bartley analyzes (among other things) congressional economic attitudes (mostly awful), foreign trade debits (complex but necessary), the federal deficit (not to worry), the savings-and-loan debacle (the New Deal started it), mergers, acquisitions and junk bonds (not so bad, really) and the fallacy of ``fairly'' taxing the rich. He puts in a good word, too, for Jay Gould and other maligned 19th-century ``robber barons'' for their roles in our economic expansion. (May)