A brand new decade - 1990 - 12 January 1990

More than a year ago, I asked permission of the controller of this radio network if I might do something I've not done through the five decades of these talks, which was to sound a particular personal note that is routine with chat show hosts, but which I felt should never intrude on my assignment to report everything and anything that came to mind about the political and social life of the people of the United States.

The idea came up on an ominous date in November of 1988, when my usual heavy flow of mail turned into a deluge of notes, cards, letters from many of the 50-odd countries that hear this talk. Letters of congratulation and goodwill, so straightforward and touching that I should like to have answered them all.

This flood brought to the acute stage a chronic crisis in my daily round that made me feel I should say that, if I'm to go on working, seeing my friends and family, not to mention keeping up with all the goings-on in this country, to answer much of this incoming mail is an impossibility.

The mail is of every sort – fascinating, tedious, wild, eccentric, informative, churlish, accusing, affectionate. Most often, the people I should like to answer are the most intelligent and interesting correspondents and they are always the ones who say, "I know you must have an impossible burden of mail, please don't bother to reply".

Whereas the people who have a bone to pick or ask for information they could get from the library, or send you a manuscript of their poems, or the originals of their great-grandfather's letters from Nebraska in 1882, "Please return at once", it's always such people who think they are the only correspondents and who write hurt letters at intervals saying "my letter must have gone astray or you're simply a callous man".

Well, honestly, very few letters go astray. But it takes just as much time as it would to answer these people as it would to assure them that they are not alone, that all my afternoons are taken up with gently turning down warm invitations to address the United Nations Association of Zurich, the Garden Club of Little Piddletrenthide, the Boy Scouts of Adelaide, the graduating class of Bombay High School, the Golf Club of Johannesburg, the Camellia Club of Mobile, Alabama, and on and on.

So, simply to pacify your disappointment and my embarrassment, let me say once for all that I'm grateful to anyone who bothers to write. I was more touched than I can say by that deluge of good wishes that saw me into a new decade, that I do my best, and that best means that I can cope with only so much of the weekly blizzard of mail that shores up against my kitchen door.

Having said which, with feeling, let me wish every correspondent a Happy New Year and now get back to the weekly letter meant for all of you.

I promised a week ago that I'd round up some of the – what shall I call them? – not events so much as social changes that came to affect our lives in the 1980s. We give labels to decades. The gay '90s, the roaring '20s, in spite of the fact that God didn't invent decades, we did. And usually, there's no good reason to think that the tides of history rise and fall every 10 years.

But for once, 1980 just happened to mark the first year of something we never expected but which we can now see was an American revolution, a drastic turn in the direction of American government for the first time since 1933.

And before we look at the social changes that flowed from it, or happened to go along with it, we must, I think, this time take a new look back to the mover and shaker himself – none other than Ronald Reagan.

I don't think any of us thought, during that heady summer of 1980, thought of Mr Reagan as anything remotely like a revolutionary. Sure, he promised to slash taxes. He promised what Franklin Roosevelt promised during his first presidential campaign, to decentralise the government and give much of it back to the states.

But the moment Roosevelt got in the White House, he performed a 180-degree U-turn, seized the executive power of the federal government and ran a central government like no other president in peacetime history.

Well, Reagan was a new-born Republican. He'd voted four times for Roosevelt, and surely he would do the same. He would say and act in the reluctant belief that, after all, Washington is the place that is primarily responsible for jobs, relief, insurance, housing, healthcare, the works. So when Mr Reagan arrived in the White House, very few veteran politicians expected him for a minute to try and legislate his soaring campaign promises.

Promises, promises are the stuff of campaigns. Once you're elected you have to liquidate your campaign rhetoric and get down to the humdrum, undramatic business of government, which is to say "who gets what".

But he had up his sleeve, in his heart too, a shocking surprise. "Now", said the Democratic leader, speaker Tip O'Neill, said to Reagan, "Now, you are in the big league".

That was not only a patronising remark, it was thoughtless. Reagan had been governor of California for eight years. California, which has been called "the great micro-cosmic national state" and which had confronted Reagan with just about every domestic issue that confronts a president.

The first minor shock was the discovery that Reagan was not a political tyro, the "Aw shucks", B-film actor who would have to be nursed into the ways of Washington. In his first 100 days, he held 69 private meetings with 400 congressmen. In Mr Carter's first 100 days, he barely got to know the majority and minority leaders in the Senate.

Mr Reagan dazzled and dazed these men by announcing his Boy Scout's fidelity to the gaudier slogans of his campaign – he'd meant what he'd said. And with an energy and an audacity that took all of the breath out of the opposition, he bulldozed through a bigger defence budget.

More to the delight of the people who'd voted for him and the secret pleasure of the people who hadn't, he slashed the income tax in half and began to abolish or trim a lot of the government bureaux.

"More money," he said "is going to come from lower taxes than from higher taxes". How could that be? Well, by broadening the tax base, having more people paying some taxes, it came true.

Now, he'd promised a balanced budget. It was soon an obvious impossibility and was forgotten. The tax deal produced a recession which Reagan said would be temporary. It was.

He then started cutting social services, producing howls of protest from the poor, from welfare dependents, from minorities, students, from all the Democrats and the liberals. But once the recession lifted, employment kept going up and up to record levels, and against all the doctrines and the warnings of the liberal economists, inflation went down and down, from Carter's 13% to 2%.

Of course there were lots of new, hidden taxes – he'd learned this trick in his eight years as governor of California. Not income taxes but they were called revenue enhancements, user fees, indexing repeal, contingency surcharges. And certainly the general public either didn't think of them as taxes, or didn't care.

What Reagan did was to bring about the absurdity he'd promised, to reverse the movement of American government, of the New Deal welfare, central government spending-and-taxing movement, to change the direction of government which had been steady from Roosevelt to Carter.

His best biographer, Mr Lou Cannon, pictured this idealistic, Midwestern youth, intuitively keen but intellectually lazy who, for all his rigid, self-help doctrines and his nostalgia for small-town America redefined the ground of political discourse and set the nation on a course of change. For better or worse? We may not know for some time.

The demoralised Democrats warned us in the early '80s that there would be a dreadful price to pay, that very soon there would be a bitter harvest. But we didn't reap it. And the Democrats said, "Well, in the long run". Well, as the man said, in the long run, we'll all be dead.

In the long, short run of the 1980s, more people were employed, more people had more money than ever before. The huge middle-class had never been better off. It was a decade of unprecedented prosperity for the great majority.

To this, the Democrats responded, at the end of Reagan's first term, by noticing that all these remarkable gains had been bought at the price of a massively growing federal deficit. The voters didn't seem to care. They sent Reagan back to the White House in another electoral landslide.

The Democrats went on dooming and glooming through the next four years about the deficit. It still didn't seem to weaken the economy. George Bush came along and surely now the country would heed the Democrats' omens? They didn't. Bush won 40 States to 10. And today the United States is riding the longest stretch of prosperity, of record employment, across almost all the regions, it has ever known.

By last year, the Democrats gave up publicly mourning the deficit. Top economists, in several western countries, outrageously said, "It didn't matter". But what did matter was the deficit in relation to the gross national product. And by that test, the United States was better off than some other economic giants – Japan, for instance.

So the Democrats pointed, rightly, to the decay of the cities, to constantly-rising crime, to the grim, undeniable fact that one American child in five lives in poverty. Do the people in the mass care? Of course they care, but the Democrats insist – imply, at least – that these are the symptoms of a sick society. The Republicans, and most of the voters, see them as nasty stains on an otherwise successful society.

Only the occasional commentator, of no particular stripe, notes the equally undeniable fact that in the past 20 years, no matter who is in the White House, the people go on demanding more government services than they are prepared to pay for. That's the bill that, sooner or later, will have to be paid.

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