Bull pulpit: how the prosperous eighties came to be - and how we can get back there.

• Author: Dentzer, Susan

How the prosperous eighties came to be--and how we can get back there

Let me make one thing clear at the outset: I believe in low marginal tax rates. In fact, they are one reason I'm willing to write this review for a not-so-princely sum of money. There was a time, just over a decade ago, when various tax authorities would have collected the lion's share of the proceeds--provided, of course, that I had bothered to write the piece at all. Today, thanks to the tax-rate cuts of the eighties, I will part with only a lion cub's share of the fruits of my labor. And for me, the government, and the economy, therein lies a world of difference.

It was with that bias that I turned to this retrospective look(*1) at the U.S. economic boom that took place from 1983 to 1990. I assumed, as would any regular reader of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which Robert Bartley commands, that this book would be a stirring apologia for America's brief walk on the supply side. Bartley doesn't disappoint: His thesis is that the mix of tax cuts and tight money the supply-siders advocated almost singlehandedly produced the Seven Fat Years of his title. Moreover, at least Seven Lean Years will probably follow, because America has strayed from the one true path.

My advice, updating Abbie Hoffman to the eighties Bartley so loves: Buy this book--and then deduct the purchase price, if you can. Not because this is the definitive account of what triggered and sustained America's longest peacetime expansion; that will be the work of a far more disinterested observer. And not because Bartley's analysis of almost any subject he tackles, whether the federal budget deficit or the S&L scandal, is flawless. Rather, the reason to read this book is that it contains vital seeds of economic truth that must be digested by anyone genuinely interested in improving the well-being of Americans. Among them: Taxes and tax rates aren't everything in a market economy, but they still matter. Capital formation isn't everything, either, but it matters a lot. Economic statistics may be accurate, and still be misleading and meaningless. And federal spending is truly out of control--a "coast-to-coast soup line," as David Stockman put it in 1980, before he became Reagan's budget director.

Above all, Bartley's book conveys a message that seems especially noxious to most liberals, but shouldn't be. It is indeed possible to conceive of a period of economic growth that could benefit a broader cross section of American society than the eighties did. But as The Seven Fat Years suggests, no one has yet figured out a way to really help the poor and the middle class over the long run without...