LAMB: Back to Michael One. How often did you have dinner there?
BARTLEY: Oh, I don't know that I could count the times. Maybe a dozen. I don't know.
LAMB: Total? I mean, you didn't go there every week?
BARTLEY: No, no. There wasn't any regular schedule to it, but of course in a way Michael One is a symbol. Even if we weren't at Michael One, these discussions about these ideas were almost constant. They would be around my desk at the Journal, they would be by phone with Laffer and Mundell, and later with Ture and Roberts in Washington, so that there was an awful lot of intellectual ferment. I wouldn't want to create the idea it only happened at Michael One.
LAMB: I just mentioned that because you devoted a chapter to it, but I wanted to find out what happened, as Michael One is a symbol. What happened with all the information that you all developed? What did you do with it?
BARTLEY: A lot of it, of course, we published in the Wall Street Journal.
LAMB: Editorials or op-ed pieces?
BARTLEY: I think probably more op-ed pieces than editorials, although we had editorials, too.
LAMB: Under whose name?
BARTLEY: Under really a great variety of people's names. Wanniski wrote some notable ones. But what we found was that once we started to run some of these ideas, authors who shared them kind of started coming out of the woodwork. We'd get submissions from people in Atlanta or San Francisco that fit as part of the framework, and we would run those. That's one reason I think that this is not something that we dreamed up all by ourselves. It was part of the temper of the time, and a lot of people were thinking around the same lines. Once an outlet for these ideas was created, it became a kind of self-generating process.
LAMB: Are you still in touch with all those people?
BARTLEY: Yes, indeed.
LAMB: There is one name I haven't mentioned that kept coming up throughout the book, and that's Jack Kemp. What role does he play, and is he your candidate for president?
BARTLEY: I think he'd make a good one. We've got enough candidates for president this year, I guess, but at some point in his career I would look enthusiastically on that. He might not be the only candidate that I would be willing to back enthusiastically. But Jack, of course, was instrumental on the political side of this. He is the fellow who picked up on these ideas and who was the driving force behind the Kemp-Roth bill that then ultimately became the Reagan 1981 tax cuts. And he's still at it today.
LAMB: You said something earlier I wanted you to define also; that rather than looking at the deficit, people ought to look at the percentage of government expense as it relates to the GNP. Why?
BARTLEY: I think that's the best single measure.
LAMB: What is GNP?
BARTLEY: GNP is the total output of the economy. I guess these days now we've switched to gross domestic product. They keep changing the figures on it.
LAMB: Can you give us a figure, roughly, on what that is? Is it $5 trillion or something like that?
BARTLEY: Yes, something in that neighborhood. I'm not real good at remembering specific figures.
LAMB: So if we have $1.2 trillion in government expenditures, that's 20 percent of the GDP?
BARTLEY: The government expenditures are now running around 24 or 25 percent of GNP. I had a chart in the book. Tax receipts are running around 19, maybe 20 percent. The interesting thing about this chart is that the receipts are really pretty stable. Going back clear to 1950 they are 20 percent. Twenty-one percent might be a record. The low might be 17 percent. It's a very narrow band. The expenditures, on the other hand, took off, starting really in 1974. The difference, of course, is the deficit.
LAMB: How high has that percentage been of GNP, the expenditure part?
BARTLEY: The expenditure part, about 25. That's federal. The state and local spending would be in addition.
LAMB: When do you get nervous?
BARTLEY: I get nervous at 25.
LAMB: For everything or just the feds?
BARTLEY: No, for the fed, I think.
LAMB: So, you're comfortable at 24.
BARTLEY: I would like to see it -- I think it's the trend more than anything else that's disturbing. I mean, the trend is more each year, and as you take more each year, it means you are taking a larger and larger share of the new money in the economy. At some point that becomes a disincentive to production or a disincentive in the private sector, and the general economy starts to slow down. I think that the rationale for looking at expenses rather than at the deficit is that the expenses are the amount of money that the government is taking out of the private sector. Whether it takes those by taxes or by borrowing them is kind of a secondary matter. The primary matter is how much money is it taking. That's measured by expenditures.
LAMB: Let me take your temperature on three men: George Bush . . .
BARTLEY: Oh, one at a time. I would have been happier if Bush had been a little more Reaganesque, a little more like Ronald Reagan. I think ultimately, however, the record is still out. The revocation of his "no new tax" pledge I think hurt him both politically and economically. I think the 1990 budget deal raising taxes once you're already in a recession is a very bad mistake. On the other hand, I'm not sure how much choice he had at that time, because it also came just as he was building support for his war in Iraq, which I support. So he may not have been in a position to have a confrontation with Congress over the budget just at that time. I think you can forgive him that a little bit. I think if he has a second term, you're likely to have a different Congress, and he might be more successful because of that.
LAMB: Will he be back?
BARTLEY: I suspect so.
LAMB: Bill Clinton.
BARTLEY: I don't have any real strong opinions about Bill Clinton. I don't think he's a menace. I'm not sure that he really believes in anything, really. His whole life has been as a politician so that if he takes a position, the starting assumption is that, well, he's taking that for some political reason, not because he actually believes in it.
LAMB: Ross Perot.
BARTLEY: Ross Perot, I don't know what he believes in either. He keeps telling us he's going to do these wonderful things as president, but he doesn't tell us what they are. I think unless he can get that straightened out, his candidacy may be in some difficulty.
LAMB: Does the Journal ever endorse?
BARTLEY: So far as I know, the Journal has endorsed one presidential candidate in its 100-and-some-year history, and that was Herbert Hoover. I think maybe we learned our lesson, and so we don't formally endorse. Now, we are pretty outspoken in our editorials, and we won't doubt where we stand in any particular election. Sometimes we may have stronger opinions than others, but if you read us you will find what we think about the men and the issues. But we don't typically write editorials saying we endorse so-and-so and because we endorse them you should vote for them. I think that's a little bit of an empty exercise.
LAMB: How many people work for you on the editorial board?
BARTLEY: My budget staff is, I think, 35 people at the moment. This includes the people abroad, it includes the leisure and arts people and it includes the clerical people. If you ask how many people are actually contributing editorials, the question becomes where do you draw the line? We don't have too many people who do that full time. We have people like Paul Gigot in Washington and Tim Ferguson in Los Angeles and George Malone in Brussels who write columns, and write one column a week plus they write editorials. The principal force behind the editorials and putting them together every day now is the deputy editor of the editorial page, Daniel Henninger. Then we have a couple of other people who write editorials full time, and then we have a variety of people, including some of the leisure and arts people, who contribute one now and then.
LAMB: How often do you actually sit down and write a full editorial personally?
BARTLEY: Probably in this last little while, every other week or so. I have also written some by-line columns here recently, though.
LAMB: And what are you most likely to feel the strongest about?
BARTLEY: I have been writing some economic editorials here because that's what we have needed. I also wrote about the Los Angeles riots in one of our two long editorials on that. I'm sure that as the presidential campaign heats up I'll have some editorials about politics. I have a way of picking off the ripest topics. They're the ones that usually get me moving.
LAMB: For a moment let's suggest that there's a 20-year-old out there watching whose always wanted to write for the Wall Street Journal. What is the best possible training to work for you at the Wall Street Journal?
BARTLEY: The best possible training for writing is writing. That's what, I think, Hemingway said. The way you write is to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair and write. The way you become a journalist is to get something published, whether it's in a campus publication or whatever. When we sit down to hire someone, on the infrequent occasions when we actually have openings, what counts are the clips; in other words, what they've published elsewhere, if they can send along with their letter. That's by far the overwhelming factor in the hiring decisions.
LAMB: In the last 20 years, how often have you had an opening?
BARTLEY: That's kind of a specific fact.
LAMB: Just in general.
BARTLEY: We are likely to have an opening at the professional level every other year or something in that neighborhood. That would include editors as well as writers.
LAMB: Your background: hometown, university and the subjects you studied.
BARTLEY: I was born in Marshall, Minn., grew up basically in Ames, Iowa, and went to Iowa State University there. Worked for a year at the Grinnell, Iowa, Herald-Register, which comes out twice a week. I had an opportunity while I was there to hone my skills as a photographer as well as a writer. I took a master's degree in political science at the University of Wisconsin -- my undergraduate major at Iowa State had been journalism -- and I was hired on at the Chicago bureau of the Wall Street Journal in 1962.
LAMB: As a reporter?
BARTLEY: Yes, I was two years as a reporter. In '64 I came on to the editorial page in New York.
LAMB: Is this book number one for you or have you written others?
BARTLEY: Oh, yes, this is the first book that I've written.
LAMB: "To my father and the memory of my mother. They arranged their lives so that I might do this." How long did you think that out? That's your dedication.
BARTLEY: Yes, well, it didn't take very long, I think.
LAMB: How did they arrange their lives to help you?
BARTLEY: They made sure that I got a good education, and they went to some effort, I think, to do that.
LAMB: Your father is alive and your mother is dead?
BARTLEY: Yes, that's right. My father is still in Iowa.
LAMB: What did he do for a living?
BARTLEY: He was a veterinarian, and while he was in Ames was a professor of veterinary medicine at the university there.
LAMB: How did they influence you in those early years?
BARTLEY: They, I guess, made me a serious young man. The traditional discipline and support, and they got me into the Ames public schools which were -- and I have every reason to believe still are -- quite remarkable schools because it's a university town, and a great percentage of the children are from faculty families. It's really a very intellectual kind of place, and at the same time a kind of down-to-earth Mid-western kind of place. A marvelous education.
LAMB: Home of Iowa State.
BARTLEY: Yes, that's right -- the engineering and agricultural college.
LAMB: In the book you mention a couple of other people. An economist by the name of Say.
BARTLEY: Jean Baptiste Say, yes.
LAMB: Who was he?
BARTLEY: He was a very notable, classical economist from a couple of centuries ago or a century ago. He was after Adam Smith.
LAMB: 1767 to 1832.
BARTLEY: Yes, I thought you might have it there. But he formed what's called Say's Law, which was kind of the bedrock proposition of classical economics. Say's Law is that production creates its own demand; in other words, that the economy is a cyclical kind of process. If you produce something you pay money. As I explain it in there, the widget makers pay their employees to make the widgets, and the employees use their compensation to buy widgets. If you extend this over an economy and over a great number and great variety of goods, you have a picture of an economy.
LAMB: When were you first introduced to him -- not in person, but I mean . . .
BARTLEY: Well, I remember Art Laffer saying during these discussions -- I don't know whether it was at Michael One or whether it was in my office -- but he was saying, "You've got to learn about Say. You've got to learn about Say's Law. It's what I believe in. It's what you believe in, too." Of course, then I didn't know what it was.
LAMB: There is another name -- I'm sure I'll mispronounce it -- Hayek. Who was he?
BARTLEY: He is a very famous Austrian economist who died this year. He was a very elderly man. He was a contemporary and a critic of Keynes, and then he was more or less forgotten for a great many years until -- well, "more or less forgotten" is not quite correct because he wrote a very famous book called The Road to Serfdom. But he wasn't viewed in the forefront of modern economics during the Keynesian era, but I think that Keynesianism kind of collapsed during the 1970s when you had this simultaneous inflation and unemployment that the Keynesian formulation doesn't even allow. I can't explain it. Well, and this perception I think gradually spread around the world, and lo and behold, very late in his life then Hayek was given a Nobel Prize for economics.
LAMB: And we'd better define who John Maynard Keynes is, or was.
BARTLEY: Well, John Maynard Keynes was the most influential economist of this century. He was British, wrote before and during the depression in Great Britain. His most famous book is called The General Theory. It really established a view of economics for two generations. It was published in the '30s, and it was really dominant until the '70s. Whole structures of thought were built around Keynes's general theory. I, and most of the people of Michael One, are admirers of Keynes as a person. His theories may have been relevant and needed during the Great Depression, but they didn't apply very well in the 1970s. There is in the book a marvelous quote from Hayek who said that toward the end of Keynes's life he was very worried that his theories might be misused. But he told Hayek, "Don't worry about it because if that ever starts to get out of hand I can turn it around overnight." Two weeks later, Keynes was dead. He couldn't turn it around. Hayek said, "Now what will have to be explained by history is how a whole generation of economists kind of woke up bewildered because they couldn't understand things that had been fairly widely understood before the Keynesian revolution."
LAMB: Knowing what you know and think about every day -- it's a leading question -- but do you ever sit and watch the political discussion and listen to people out in the country talk back and say, "If they really knew what they were talking about, they'd never say that"?
BARTLEY: You have occasions of that, of course. I'm kind of a populist. I believe that the common people out there in the country are really pretty smart. They may not be able to tell you about Keynes and Hayek and all that, but they have a kind of a street sense of what's working and what isn't out on the street. I think that when you get something like the kind of change in the mood that I was talking about in 1978, that often the common people in the street are ahead of the policy-makers and the big thinkers.
LAMB: This is what the book looks like. It's by Robert L. Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal. It's called "The Seven Fat Years and How To Do It Again." Thank you for joining us.
BARTLEY: Thank you very much, Brian. |
