HE WAS JUST TOO SMALL A MAN FOR THE JOB:

Little appreciated or acknowledged, however, is how much Reagan's presidency built off Carter policies.

Perhaps the single quote for which Reagan is best known was his remark "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." It is often said that Reagan "won" the Cold War. But it was the supposedly soft Carter who deployed Pershing missiles to Germany and evaluated the deadly and controversial neutron bomb to counter Soviet threats to overrun Western Europe.

It was President Carter who led the United States to boycott the Moscow Olympics. It was the Carter administration that in 1979 began arming the Afghans who were pushing back on the Soviet invasion, a policy continued by President Reagan. Many historians believe that it was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan that resulted in the collapse of what Mr. Reagan called "the evil empire."

Re-evaluating Carter's economic legacy

As a free market conservative Ronald Reagan was an advocate of minimal regulation. Perhaps his second most famous quotation was. "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" Here again the Carter administration planted the seeds starting with the deregulation of the airline industry led by economist, political advisor, and Chair of the Civil Aeronautics Board, Alfred Kahn.

The major plank of Reagan's 1980 campaign was the proposal to effect large reductions in US income taxes. The theoretical foundation on which this policy was based was the so-called Laffer Curve, named after economist Walter Laffer, which held that lower taxes would increase tax revenues both by reducing tax avoidance and also increased productive effort ("supply side") motivated by lower tax rates.

Here again, Carter had foreshadowed Reagan policies. One of the themes of Carter's successful 1976 campaign resulted in the "Tax Reduction and Simplification Act of 1977" which lowered tax rates including a $900 billion reduction in corporate taxes.

On the other hand, there is no question that inflation was the black mark on the Carter presidency and the one thing for which those years are most often remembered. Carter's first Fed appointment, G. William Miller, resisted strong members to fight inflation such that the inflation rate averaged 13.3 percent in 1979.

Forgotten in the footnotes is the fact that Paul Volker, the Federal Reserve chair who strangled inflation out of the economy - one of the biggest achievements of the Reagan administration - was appointed to that position by Jimmy Carter with the express mandate to tackle inflation.

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