Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status

With the economy flat on its back, unemployment at a twenty-five-year high, and the housing default crisis still worsening, people are eager to learn how America can become the land of economic opportunity and prosperity again. While Keynesian economist Paul Krugman offered his analysis of the crisis in the New York Times bestselling book, The Return of Depression Economics and The Crisis of 2008, supply-side economist Arthur B. Laffer, who helped design the policies that pulled America out of the low-growth, high-inflation 1970s and put the economy on the track that led to twenty-five years of prosperity, presents a completely different prescription for restoring America’s economic health.

Asserting that the Bush-Obama plan is a failure that has only produced a cascade of trillions of dollars of debt, Dr. Laffer identifies the common sense principles of good economic behavior and lays out the changes that must be made in Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy, Trade Policy, and Incomes Policy to get the U.S. economy growing again. The Way Back presents an urgently needed road map to recovery from one of America’s most distinguished and highly experienced economists.

When Arthur B. Laffer spearheaded the theory of supply-side economics and became a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, he took his place as an economic icon. More recently, he joined with Stephen Moore and Peter J. Tanous to write The End of Prosperity — a clarion call delineating what is wrong with current political approaches to America's present economic challenges. Steve Forbes himself described The End of Prosperity as "brilliantly insightful," saying "READ IT — AND ACT!"

Now Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore follow the rousing success of The End of Prosperity with a book even more vital to America and Americans, delivering a plan that shows how our country can regain its lost prosperity. With the economy flat on its back, unemployment at a twenty-five-year high, and the housing default crisis still worsening, is this even possible? But America can once again become the land of economic opportunity, and this brilliant new book tells us exactly how.

While President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama may hail from different parties, their response to the crisis has been strikingly similar. The Bush-Obama plan is a failure that has produced nothing except a cascade of trillions of dollars of debt. Is the situation hopeless?

No, say Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore resoundingly, the situation is not hopeless. A return to prosperity is still entirely possible...if the correct strategies are followed. In The End of Prosperity, the authors primarily discussed how lower taxes areessential to economic growth. Now, in Return to Prosperity, they detail the other essential components: putting government at all levels on a low-fat diet; emphasizing debt reduction and retirement; and bringing back the investor class in America, where every American can "own a piece of the rock."

In a time where most of the proposed solutions are fraught with peril, the argument provides a refreshing counterbalance. The Return to Prosperity is a prescription that gives America the fundamental tools it needs in order to set about recovery. This book is an urgently needed road map to renewed prosperity, and it is vital reading for anyone who worries that the current economy is faltering, with no clear plan articulated for recovery.

Arthur B. Laffer, Ph.D. is the founder and chairman of Laffer Associates, an economic research and consulting firm.  A member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board for both of his two terms, he invented the Laffer Curve and triggered a world-wide tax-cutting movement in the 1980s.  Dr. Laffer received a B.A. in economics from Yale University and received a MBA and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

Stephen Moore, an economist and policy analyst who founded and served as president of the Club for Growth from 1999 to 2004, is a member of the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal and a Senior Economics Writer at The Journal.