Obama should have followed Reagan plan.

• Position: Stimulus Package - Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan's Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981

The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA) offers a blueprint for fiscal stimulus that would be far more effective than the package approved by Pres. Barack Obama, contends Bill Brown, a visiting professor of the practice of law at Duke University, Durham, N.C. "Simply pushing money into the economy via infrastructure projects, no matter how well intentioned, is not the answer," asserts Brown, who joined the Duke faculty after an extensive career on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs, AIG, and, most recently, Morgan Stanley, where he was global co-head of listed derivatives.

During the early days of the Reagan Administration, a time plagued by slow economic growth, high interest rates, and runaway inflation, ERTA not only reduced tax rates, but established a powerful set of incentives to promote investment in income-producing "capital assets"--plant, property, and equipment--according to Brown. It resuscitated the Kennedy-era investment tax credit (ITC), which gave businesses partial reimbursement for the purchase of every new income-producing asset they acquired, and it added to this subsidy by allowing all those assets to be depreciated extremely rapidly under the new Accelerated Cost Recovery System (ACRS).

"ERTA helped break us out of the economic quagmire of the 1970s," Brown points out. "Sure, it lowered tax rates for everybody, but its most important legacy was...