The Least You Need to Know

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 banning abortion (except in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s life). In recent years, some opposition to abortion has been fanatical, leading to the bombing of abortion clinics and the murder of medical personnel.

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 beginning of the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which the president called an “evil empire.” Yet, during the Reagan years, the national debt also rose from a staggering $1 trillion to a stupefying $4 trillion. And the period was convulsed by a terrible epidemic of a new, fatal, and costly disease, AIDS, which the administration met largely with indifference and denial.

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 banner of supply-side economics, a belief that the economy thrives by stimulating the production of goods and services (the supply side) because (according to advocates of the theory) supply creates demand. Make it, and people will buy it. Government’s proper role is to stimulate production by reducing taxes as well as reducing regulation of industry. Yet, even as taxes are reduced, supply-side economics also demands that the government operate on a balanced budget, since deficit spending encourages destructive inflation.

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.