There followed the miracle of the 1986 tax reform, whose core ideas the Treasury Department stole (under deepest cover) from former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J. Defense spending peaked. And Reagan, his fingers burned, ceased attempting to wreck Social Security, which survived him and, so far, his successors.

But in the end Reagan's means to recovery largely exhausted the U.S. banking and financial system. The stock market collapse of October 1987 was one sign of the strain. The economy went back into recession in 1990, and banks lay dormant, rebuilding their balance sheets but not lending much to the public until 1994. It was for this reason, perhaps more than any other, that the presidency of Bush I did not survive. So I suppose we can thank Reagan, in part, for the rise of Clinton.

Apart from that, what did Reaganomics amount to?

In the summer and early fall of 1981, as the recession deepened, the late Rep. Henry Reuss, D-Wis., chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, would ask Republican colleagues when they would admit that the "Reagan economic recovery program" had finally taken effect? The Republicans, for understandable reasons, kept saying that it hadn't started yet. But finally they allowed that October 1, 1981, could be called the start date.

On that morning, I supplied Reuss with a poem, "The End of the World," by Archibald MacLeish. Reuss duly read it into the Congressional Record (to the great poet's delight, as we soon learned).

It is not an epitaph for Ronald Reagan the man, who deserves a respectful sendoff. But for his economists and their ideas, it will do.

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb--
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

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