Response #1REAGAN CREATED THE GI BILL FOR THE REGULAR PEOPLE

The Roman Legions used the short sword for centuries to stab and hack at opponents. It was effective because the stabbing motion could disable an enemy (peer competior to the Kerry crowd) and allow a Roman soldier to move on to the next peer competitor and respectfully adjust his ability to compete. Reagan has been disabled since 1992, but perhaps because they feared that "The Great Communicator" could somehow fight back they let him alone. Not now. The short swords are out. Stabbing thrusts punched from mostly webzines, the New York and LA Times, as well as the Networks are meant to disabble a corpse. It's as if a dead Ronald Reagan could still menace them with his smile. Like he might sit up in his coffin and destroy them with

...all in all I'd rather be here than in a government program."

The current attacks are an election tactic by the Left. They don't want Bush to get any traction from Reagan. The networks all put out the same deficit story last night, so it can't be an accident. The charges being made against him are two: that he lied about a deficit by lowering taxes and created a $4 trillion dollar debt, and that the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway; that Reagan had little or nothing to do with it. Side issues of the "crime" of Iran Contra, the usual accusations of racism, ignoring AIDS, and hurting little people fill out the dance ticket.

TODAY I'll examine just the 4 trillion deficit. Twenty million "tax generating" new jobs were created for a deficit cost of $4 trillion, probably not an accurate figure because lots of the money went to government entitlements, but let's work with the 4 tril. Dividing it out, twenty million jobs were created at a cost of $200,000 per job. Some of the jobs were new businesses. Microsoft was nothing. Software was nothing. Computers were toys. There was no Dell. HP made calculators. Biotech??? Hi Tech? There was only Texas Tech and Georgia Tech. But business creation exploded. Each one of those new jobs and businesses in turn paid back in taxes and job creation how much? . Nobody can say, but Reagan's policies certainly created more tax revenues EVENTUALLY than the cost of the twenty million new jobs.

Deregulation was part of the package. The Deregulation of the phone company in 1984 reduced telephone costs to the consumer by $40 billion per year. When Reagan took office it was illegal to have a phone answering machine. If you wanted an answering machine you had to hire an answering service at a cost of $30 per month and up. You HAD to have a phone manufactured by Bell approved companies (Western Electric out west) and they rented phones to you at a fixed cost every month. Private switchboards were not allowed, they had to be approved by the phone company. So you have to count the amount of money pumped back into consumer pockets as part of the "deficit".

At the time Reagan was elected I was the national sales manager for The American Entrepreneur Association (Entrepreneur Magazine). It was a very small operation. We had great product aside from the magazine. We produced manuals on how to start and operate more than 100 businesses. When the 70% tax was cut to 28%, our company grew 300% in a matter of 6 months. Suddenly all kinds of people decided to go into their own businesses because it finally made economic sense. We went from grossing about $500,000 per month to nearly $1,000,000 per week. Our customers were black, Arab, Asian, white, and everything else you can think of. That tax cut was raw meat for millions of people who wanted to start their own businesses. I remember talking to a woman who "didn't understand" a manual she had bought from us. She was telling me that she just couldn't start a business because she wasn't educated. I remember that I told her to read the manual carefully and if there was one word in it about having to be educated I'd give her a 200% refund. The SBA had told her she wasn't qualified; they told her in effect that she was too stupid to go into business for herself. The manual told her how to start her particular business from her house at a total cost of three or four hundred dollars. I called her back a week later and she told me she was going downtown to get her business license in the morning; she could hire a bookkeeper when she needed one; she bought another manual we had on promoting a business for no money. She made the decision when she simply factored in the deductions for running a small business under the new tax laws (simple math). The tax cut "made her feel good". Made her feel that anything was possible for her. Anything is possible for any of us, we just need the frame of mind to try. Reagan gave us that. Reagan gave that lady the confidence to try.

The four trillion was a creative deficit, eventually. The stock market advanced twenty per cent per year for more than eight years, increasing wealth exponentially and generating even more taxes; capital gains and income. The Dow went from under 1,000 to more than 2,000; the S&P rose 113%, the smaller indexes gained even more. Unemployment went from 10% to just over 6% (at that time 6% was considered full employment and anything lower than that was supposed to be ruinously inflationary).

The question for us today is only this: why the nastiness about our 40th prez? It's because Reagan cut the government out of the success story. He asked and answered the question: isn't it better to put policies in place that will allow individuals to create our own jobs and opportunities than to have government do it with make work programs? Don't the private sector jobs last longer than a bridge building project? Yes, he ran up a 4 trillion dollar deficit. I think what was produced was more than worth it. A GI Bill for regular people.

The current criticism is not over the deficit. The criticism is over cutting government out of the process. The Left now attacking Reagan would have taxed everyone to death and put people to work on government projects. Reagan didn't play that game. He is still the moron to the Left. Even dead and buried he is a menace. He must be stopped. Then so must Jefferson. People have said that if Thomas Jefferson was alive today he'd be in jail. If it were up to liberals that is where Reagan would always have been.

Tomorrow I'll look at the Soviet Union collapse.