Brit-Am Historical Reports (19 May, 2014, 19 Iyar, 5774)
Contents:
1. The Economic Acheivements of President Reagan.
Reaganomics Vs. Obamanomics: Facts And Figures
by Peter Ferrara
2. Why President Truman Recognized Israel
3. Ancient City of Petra Built to Align With the Sun
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1. The Economic Acheivements of President Reagan. Reaganomics Vs. Obamanomics: Facts And Figures
by Peter Ferrara (forwarded by Craig White)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2011/05/05/reaganomics-vs-obamanomics-facts-and-figures/
Extracts:
When President Reagan entered office in 1981, he faced actually much worse economic problems than President Obama faced in 2009. Three worsening recessions starting in 1969 were about to culminate in the worst of all in 1981-1982, with unemployment soaring into double digits at a peak of 10.8%.
... The poverty rate started increasing in 1978, eventually climbing by an astounding 33%, from 11.4% to 15.2%. A fall in real median family income that began in 1978 snowballed to a decline of almost 10% by 1982.
President Reagan campaigned on an explicitly articulated, four-point economic program to reverse this slow motion collapse of the American economy:
1. Cut tax rates to restore incentives for economic growth, which was implemented first with a reduction in the top income tax rate of 70% down to 50%, and then a 25% across-the-board reduction in income tax rates for everyone. The 1986 tax reform then reduced tax rates further, leaving just two rates, 28% and 15%.
2. Spending reductions... Even with the Reagan defense buildup, which won the Cold War without firing a shot, total federal spending declined from a high of 23.5% of GDP in 1983 to 21.3% in 1988 and 21.2% in 1989. That's a real reduction in the size of government relative to the economy of 10%.
3. Anti-inflation monetary policy restraining money supply growth compared to demand, to maintain a stronger, more stable dollar value.
4. Deregulation, which saved consumers an estimated $100 billion per year in lower prices. Reagan's first executive order, in fact, eliminated price controls on oil and natural gas. Production soared, and aided by a strong dollar the price of oil declined by more than 50%.
These economic policies amounted to the most successful economic experiment in world history. The Reagan recovery started in official records in November 1982, and lasted 92 months without a recession until July 1990, when the tax increases of the 1990 budget deal killed it. This set a new record for the longest peacetime expansion ever, the previous high in peacetime being 58 months.
During this seven-year recovery, the economy grew by almost one-third, the equivalent of adding the entire economy of West Germany, the third-largest in the world at the time, to the U.S. economy. In 1984 alone real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years. Nearly 20 million new jobs were created during the recovery, increasing U.S. civilian employment by almost 20%. Unemployment fell to 5.3% by 1989.
...Astoundingly, inflation from 1980 was reduced by more than half by 1982, to 6.2%. It was cut in half again for 1983, to 3.2%, never to be heard from again until recently.
....the American standard of living increased by almost 20% in just seven years. The poverty rate declined every year from 1984 to 1989, dropping by one-sixth from its peak.
In The End of Prosperity, supply side guru Art Laffer and Wall Street Journal chief financial writer Steve Moore point out that this Reagan recovery grew into a 25-year boom, with just slight interruptions by shallow, short recessions in 1990 and 2001.
... the Reagan recovery was achieved while taming a historic inflation, for a period that continued for more than 25 years.
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2. Why President Truman Recognized Israel
Thank you Harry Truman!
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.co.il/2008/03/thank-you-harry-truman.html
Mishloach Manos today, I heard a great story that appears in a book called "Bimchitzatam" (In their Shadows), which was written in Hebrew by former ultra-Orthodox MK Shlomo Lorenz about his encounters with great personages over the course of his political career. Part of the story appears here, but not all of it.
It is well known that one of the first countries to recognize the State of Israel in 1948 was the United States and that the decision to do so was made personally by then President Harry S. Truman. Lorenz met Truman sometime in the 1950's. According to Lorenz, Truman told him that the reason he decided to recognize the State of Israel was because as a boy in Missouri, Truman met two Orthodox Rabbis for whom he acted as the "Shabbos goy" - the non-Jew who does things like turn on lights or heat, which Jews are not allowed to do on the Sabbath. Truman was very impressed with these men's principles and moral values.
At the same time, Truman would study the Old Testament with his grandfather on Sundays and read the story of Cyrus, the Persian emperor who helped build the Second Temple in the sixth century before the Common Era. Truman vowed that if he were ever in the position to do so, he would take whatever action he could to help the Jews rebuild their Temple. When the State of Israel declared its independence, Truman insisted on recognizing the new state against the advice of his advisers. Truman was castigated for this in the mainstream media - he was even called a traitor. But according to Lorenz, Truman went ahead anyway, because he wished to emulate Cyrus and because he was so impressed with the principles and morality of those two rabbis for whom he served as the Shabbos goy.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem
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3. Ancient City of Petra Built to Align With the Sun
The Nabatean culture erected the city to highlight solstices, equinoxes.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140317-petra-jordan-nabatean-sun-civilization-ancient-culture/
Extracts:
An ancient civilization built the famous, stone-hewn city of Petra so that the sun would illuminate their sacred places like celestial spotlights, a new study says.
Petra, a giant metropolis of tombs, monuments, and other elaborate religious structures carved into stone cliffs, was the capital of the Nabatean kingdom, a little-understood Middle Eastern culture that ruled much of modern-day Jordan from the third century B.C. until the first century A.D.
These wealthy spice traders worshiped the sun, among other deities, and may have given importance to the equinoxes, solstices, and other astronomical events that are determined by how the sun moves across the sky.
Solstices, for instance, are the results of Earth's north-south axis being tilted 23.5 degrees relative to the plane of our solar system. This tilt causes different amounts of sunlight to reach different regions of the planet during Earth's year-long orbit around the sun.
... Belmonte and his colleagues measured the spatial orientations of large monuments, temples, and sacred tombs and compared the measurements with how the structures aligned with the position of the sun on the horizon.
Because that position changes very slowly through time, the amount of change between the first century B.C. and today is small, so what Belmonte and his team saw was very close to what the Nabateans would have observed.
The results of their study showed that during certain times of the year, such as the winter solstice, the sun would highlight or align with some of the city's most important buildings.