By Brian Domitrovic | Forbes.com |
Last week, a fine event took place in Charlottesville, Va., at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. A dozen members of the policy circle of the great Congressman Jack Kemp gathered there to record an oral history of their working days together in the 1970s and 1980s.
What hefty reflections there were to make. For Kemp (who died in 2009) ranks as one of the most influential members of the House of Representatives of the 20th century. Kemp was the legislator who took down stagflation – the terrible unemployment- and inflation-laden economic malaise that gripped this country for a horrid baker’s dozen years from 1969 to 1982. The only reason we call our own economy today the worst since the Great Depression is that we have forgotten the long 1970s.