(9 of 12) By 1984, in good time for his re-election campaign,
the GNP was growing a robust 6.8%, while inflation had dropped
to 4.3%. And from then on, despite the spectacular but brief
stock-market crash in 1987, the boom kept right on booming.
Those gains, however, were unequally distributed. Reagan liked
to say that the government provided a "safety net" for the
"truly needy," but it was during these years that, for the first
time since the Depression, there appeared those huddled figures
who became known as "the homeless." Another pillar of Reagan's
approach was to get government out of the way of growing
businesses. Deregulation had started tentatively under Carter
with the airlines, but Reagan applied it broadly, to energy and
broadcasting and butressed it with a dismantling of antitrust
laws. Reagan was a staunch free-trader and did little to stop
the onslaught against sluggish American corporations from
aggressive Japanese manufacturers. Reagan's term coincided with
the height of Japan's economic boom