Perry L. Gardner: Private Journal #9
Monday, March 28, 1988
The flu bug is still with me. I’ve felt knocked out for weeks. It is spring, and I would like to get out in the garden and the boat, but I had a 99° fever when I got up this morning.
I did manage to start the income tax last week, and there is hope for a refund, but I haven’t much felt like working on it.
I finished reading Robert Lekachman’s Greed is Not Enough: Reaganomics, and now I am starting to read John Anderson’s The American Economy We Need. It should be interesting to compare the Left vs. Centrist viewpoints. At least they both agree Reaganomics is a fraud.
Lekachman presents a grim picture and offers the alternatives of a garrison state, or corporate planning as the conservatives try to hold onto power. (Felix Royhatyn is an advocate of corporate planning, as demonstrated in the plan to keep New York City out of bankruptcy–which did the job, but again, lower-income families got hurt.)
His Agenda for the left includes pursuit of Full Employment, reconstruction of urban communities, stable prices (through controls), increased equity in the distribution of income and wealth, and effective political control of corporate policy—in particular, regulation of investment.