Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan moved into the White House as the new president of the US. Before then, as a Republican candidate seeking to unseat Democrat Jimmy Carter, Reagan didn't have much going in the way of an appealing message until June 1980 when a little-known theory formed the centrepiece of his campaign.
Six years earlier, in 1974, at the Two Continents restaurant in Washington, DC, Arthur Laffer had sat down to dinner with two Republican staffers in the Gerald Ford administration – Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
