Mr. Buckley and his old friend and adversary occasionally have such a good time slanging each other that they have to remind themselves to get back to the recession, but

the audience wins either way. One sample: WFB: "We went longer than at any time in

postwar history without a recession. Now, was this simply the magical accomplishment

of Ronald Reagan, or is your profession learning something about governing business

cycles that we didn't know ten years ago?" JKG: "That is an important question and I'm

not going to attribute further blame to Ronald Reagan, much as I enjoy doing it. We have

entered into something that is new, dangerously new, and that is a high-unemployment/

low-performance equilibrium. We had that in the 1930s. This is much less serious than

it was then, but the notion that there is an automatic recovery process is something that

we must now question."