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The Least You Need to Know
The 1960s and 1970s saw Americans reexamining themselves and struggling to redefine their nation in an effort to renew the American dream.
Ronald Reagan took his sweeping victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980 as a mandate for a rebirth of patriotism and a revolution in economics.
Word for the Day
The rise of feminism brought many changes and proposed changes to American society, including the modification of sexist (gender-biased) language. For example, the word mankind excluded women; feminists preferred humankind. The use of Mrs. and Miss suggested to that a woman’s value was unfairly bound to her marital status (in contrast, men are addressed simply as Mr., whether married or not). The abbreviation Ms. (pronounced mizz) was widely adopted as a more equitable female counterpart to Mr.
Main Event
In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Roe v. Wade, which had its origin in a suit brought by a woman against the state of Texas for having denied her the right to an abortion. In. a 7-to-1 vote, the high court determined that women have a constitutional right to abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.
Abortion is the most controversial right women have asserted, and the Roe v. Wade decision gave rise to a so-called Right to Life anti-abortion movement. Usually motivated by religious conviction, Right to Life advocates have campaigned for a constitutional amendment ba
Stats
1993 U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics reveal continued inequality of pay for men and women. Among white adults earning hourly wages, 1,290,000 men (over age 16) earned $4.25 or less, compared with 2,177,000 women at this level.
12,415,000 men were paid $10 or more, compared with only 7,186,000 women. (Figures for blacks and those of Hispanic origin show narrower gaps between men and women at the lower range, but wider gaps at the top.)
Stats
Because OPEC nations still hold 77 percent of the world proven oil reserves, the organization will continue to remain an important force in the world’s economy.
Main Event
Americans have typically had a love-hate relationship with their nation’s greatest city, New York. But during the 1970s, Gotham became an unwilling emblem of all that was going wrong with urban America. Poverty, decay, crime, and corruption were bigger there than anywhere else and always under the national spotlight. In 1975, Mayor Abe Bearne issued the astounding statement that his city could not pay its creditors. New York City, cultural center of the nation and home of Wall Street, was broke.
President Gerald Ford did not help matters when he steadfastly resisted extending federal aid to the city to prevent it from defaulting, and the New York Daily News trumpeted an instantly famous headline: “FORD TO NY: DROP DEAD!”
Fortunately, through the efforts of Democratic leaders such as Texas representative Jim Wright, Congress voted emergency loans amounting to $2.3 billion, the city avoided bankruptcy, ultimately recovered, and paid back the loan-with interest.
Word for the Day
An ayatollah is a religious leader among the Shiite Muslims, whose religious zeal and orthodoxy is often compared to that of Christian fundamentalists.
A New Economy, a Plague, a Fallenwall, and a Desert in Flames
(1980-1991)
In This Chapter
Rise and fall of Reaganomics
The AIDS crisis
Victory in the Cold War and the Persian Gulf
Iran-Contra scandal
The presidency of James Monroe (1817-25) ushered in an “era of good feelings,” a time of perceived national well-being. Much the same happened during the two terms of Ronald Reagan, the most popular president since Ike Eisenhower. Where President Carter took a stern moral tone with the nation, admonishing his fellow Americans to conserve energy, save money, and generally do with a little less, President Reagan congratulated his countrymen on the fact of being Americans and assured them that all was well—or would be well, just as soon as he got “big government off our backs.”
For a time, business boomed during the Reagan years—though the boom was largely the result of large-scale mergers and acquisitions, the shifting back and forth of assets, rather than any great strides in production. True, too, the Reagan administration saw the begi
Many things good and bad befell the Reagan years, yet, for the most part and for most people, only the good seemed to stick. The bad slid off Ronald Reagan with such ease that the press dubbed him the “Teflon president.”
Supply Side and Trickle Down
Following his inauguration, President Reagan lost no time in launching an economic program formulated by his conservative economic advisors. The program was quarterbacked by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director David Stockman (b. 1946), whose ascetic appearance seemed to signal his ruthlessness as a slasher of taxes and domestic social welfare spending. The new administration marched under the ba
The Reagan revolution turned on three major policies: a reduction in government regulation of commerce and industry; aggressive budget cutting; aggressive tax cutting-not for middle-and lower-income individuals, but for the wealthy and for businesses. Reducing the tax burden on the rich was supposed to free up more money for investment, the benefits of which would ultimately “trickle down” to the less well off in the form of more and better jobs.
If trickle down was a hard concept for many to swallow, Reagan’s insistence that a reduction in tax rates would actually increase government revenues seemed downright bizarre to some. When Ronald Reagan and the man who would be his vice president, George Bush, were battling one another in the Republican primaries, Bush branded the notion voodoo economics—a phrase that would come back to haunt Bush in subsequent campaigns. But conservative economist Arthur Laffer (b. 1940) theorized that tax cuts would stimulate increased investment and savings, thereby ultimately increasing taxable income and generating more revenue. President Reagan made frequent reference to the “Laffer Curve,” which illustrated this process.