Amongst the BBC coverage of the death of the former US president Ronald Reagan, there was an interesting item about the relationship between Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
We all know how much Mrs Thatcher admired Reagan and that, from the latter's arrival in office in 1981, they formed a powerful mutual admiration society.
But one BBC correspondent recalled sitting on a haystack in California with Reagan during a campaign interval in 1980, and learning how much - even before he became president - he admired her.
Specifically, he said he wanted to emulate what she was doing by "getting the government off the backs of the people".
A few years later, in an interview with the London Director magazine, Mrs Thatcher told the late George Bull that her ambition was to transform the British political scene and make the leading parties more like Republicans and Democrats - implying a decisive and permanent shift of the centre of gravity to the right.
Well, she certainly achieved a decisive shift. Whether it is permanent will be for future historians to decide. For better or worse - and, in my unfashionable view, it was for worse - Reagan and Thatcher made such an impact on their respective societies that their names were given to Reaganomics and Thatcherism.
The anti-government rhetoric of both leaders did a lot of damage to the very concept of public service. In front of cabinet ministers and officials, Mrs Thatcher used to rail against government as though she were an outsider from another planet, not at the head of it.
And the anti-government rhetoric of both was overdone. Of course, governments and officialdom have to be watched at every turn. But it is impossible to run large democratic societies without a considerable degree of government - the real point being that the emphasis should be on good government, not no government.
There was a fundamental flaw at the heart of Reagonomics, namely the idea - epitomised by the famous Laffer Curve - that tax cuts would pay for themselves via greater incentives.
The truth was that the supply side doctrine was a crude and intellectually shabby attempt to justify tax cuts for the rich. For those with incomes above $250,000 (£135,879) a year, taxes as a percentage of income came down from 48.6% to 38.9% between 1980 and 1984.
The way in which certain tax exemptions were removed actually led to a rise in the proportion of income paid in tax by the lowest income groups. In most of the eulogies for Reagan this week, all those cuts in government expenditure on food stamps, school lunches, welfare Medicaid and subsidised housing have been forgotten.
The great economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, put it in a nutshell when he said there was something strange about a doctrine holding that the rich would work harder if they had more money and the poor would if they had less.
In Britain, Mrs Thatcher and her chancellor, Lord Lawson, also tried to justify tax cuts as self-financing - with similar results to those in the US.
But whatever one's left/right views about the distribution of income and tax strategy, the lasting damage of Reaganomics was illustrated recently when the sacked US treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, revealed that Dick Cheney told him Reagan had proved "deficits don't matter".
The present president's father ought to know that they do. After George Bush senior had promised "Read my lips - no new taxes", he had to eat his words and raise taxes when confronted with the deficits inherited from the Reagan era.
The budgetary chickens have yet to come home to roost in his son's US. Reaganomics never was quite what it seemed.
· William Keegan is the Observer's senior economics commentator