Reagan's economic record

Much of the focus of the last week has been on Ronald Reagan's role in the demise of Soviet Communism, but his economic achievements are just as impressive. If you're my age or older, you remember the '70s when double-digit inflation and double-digit mortgage rates seemed to be a fact of life, when gas prices skyrocketed, and it seemed like things would only get worse. Now we take the absence of inflation and low interest rates for granted, and gas prices are well below their 1970s levels in constant dollars.

Critics of Reagan's record charged that the gap between rich and poor grew, that the jobs created were low-paying, that the tax cuts helped only the very wealthy, that homelessness became epidemic because of his policies, and that the Reagan years were a decade of greed and neglect.

National Review Online now features the contents of its 1992 special issue, "The Real Reagan Record", which answers those charges. The articles are chock-full of numbers, graphs, and analysis from economists. Well worth revisiting.