Finding Quality Elected Officials

I’m afraid that Anderson left out a couple of key words in his effusive tribute to the 1980s. What we really had during that decade is “the largest, sustained economic growth (of debt) in American history.” Debt which will hang heavily on the American public for generations to come, but which added little in the way of meaningful economic advancement.

Oh sure, thanks to the now infamous 1981 revision to the income tax code, we diverted countless billions to the benefit of the real estate industry. And while we diverted much of the economic strength of the United States into pointless development of downtown office buildings and suburban business “parks,” many of which still stand empty today, our trading partners built up their long-term capital goods and consumer-product market penetrations.

As a direct result, we enriched our trading partners in the 1980s to the net amount of well over $1 trillion ($500 billion to Japan alone) and in the process, the U.S. became the world’s largest debtor nation.

The only real outcome of the economic “boom” of the 1980s is that we citizens must now pay increased taxes to all levels of government in order to clear up the economic mess left behind by the savings-and-loan deregulators, the junk-bond issuers, the leveraged-buyout manipulators and the supply-side economists, who held sway during the decade of the 1980s.

A. DANIEL ELIASON, Santa Barbara