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Additionally, Dr. Gutzman credited Mr. Reagan for establishing a supply side tax cut that followed the theory that when tax rates get too high there is a reduction in revenue to the federal government.
In August 1981, the former president signed an across-the-board tax cut that reduced taxes by a combined 25 percent over three years.
David Stockman of Greenwich, Mr. Reagan's first director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been critical of the fiscal deficits that the former president's economic policies generated over the years.
"Looking back, the only thing that can be said to have been innocent about the Reagan Revolution was the objective of improving upon what we inherited," he wrote in his 1986 book, "The Triumph of Politics," making reference to the economic downturn under Democratic President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. "The inflation-battered American economy of 1980 was no more sustainable or viable than is the deficit-burdened economy of 1986. Likewise, the bloated American welfare state budget of 1980 was not very defensible; it merited at least a strong and principled challenge.
"But the Reagan Revolution's abortive effort to rectify these inherited conditions cannot be simply exonerated as a good try that failed," the former budget director stated.
"The magnitude of the fiscal wreckage and the severity of the economic dangers that resulted are too great to permit such an easy verdict. In the larger scheme of democratic fact and economic reality there lies a harsher judgment," Mr. Stockman continued. "In fact, it was the basic assumptions and fiscal architecture of the Reagan Revolution itself which first introduced the folly that now envelops our economic governance."
Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson wrote earlier this year that the deficit in 1988, the last full year that Mr. Reagan was in office, was at a record 3.2 percent of gross domestic product.
Dr. Gutzman said the fiscal deficits, which apparently contributed to the economic downturn of the early 1990s under his successor, President George H.W. Bush, were partly, but not mainly, his fault.
Mr. Samuelson has given Mr. Reagan and Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1979 to 1987, high marks for controlling inflation but "mixed reviews" on other economic issues.
Dr. Gutzman, a New York Times best-selling author, praised Mr. Volcker, who is now an adviser to Democratic President Barack Obama, for making the decision in the early 1980s to "jack up interest rates, which is exactly what the country needed. We needed to spur savings."
"It created short-term economic dislocation, which is what the country needs now," he said.
He said the current economic policies are making the American dollar "worthless" and he feared that under Mr. Obama the "very rigorous economic times have not started yet" even though the country reportedly has been in a recession since late 2007 that is the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Dr. Gutzman said that Mr. Obama is making the same mistake that Democratic President Jimmy Carter, Mr. Reagan's immediate predecessor, made in the late 1970s by establishing an economic stimulus package.
"They didn't understand that the fiscal stimulus would make the situation worse," he said, making reference to the $787 billion package that Mr. Obama signed this last February.
Regarding foreign policy, Dr. Gutzman said that Mr. Reagan won "the Cold War" against Communism, which had been considered an "extremist" view in the 1960s when it was embraced by U.S. Sens. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and John Tower (R-Tex.)
Former state Sen. Mark Nielsen of Ridgefield, who was twice the Republican nominee in the Fifth Congressional District and has long been an ardent advocate for Mr. Reagan's policies, has said that every president from Harry Truman in the 1940s through Jimmy Carter in the 1970s had only considered "containing" Communism.
Dr. Gutzman said that Mr. Reagan thought that the strategic arms limitation agreements that American presidents negotiated with the now defunct Soviet Union in the 1970s were "non-sensical" since the United States had a huge advantage in nuclear weapons at the time that they were negotiated they "allowed the Soviets to catch up."
He said that Mr. Reagan's initiation of strategic arms reduction negotiations and his strategic defense initiative, which became known as Star Wars, helped end the Cold War.
Dr. Gutzman said that the last Soviet defense minister said that Mr. Reagan's actions were "the reason for the end of the Soviet Union."
The professor, an "Army brat" who said his admiration for Mr. Reagan began when his father was stationed in Panama in the 1970s, also praised Mr. Reagan's judicial appointments, indicating that most of the judges exercised "restraint in policymaking."
In addition to saying that the former president was "partly" responsible for the huge federal budget deficits of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Dr. Gutzman criticized Mr. Reagan for signing the 1986 immigration reform bill.
He said at the time there were an estimated 2 million illegal immigrants in the United States. Recent estimates have indicated that there are now 12 million.
Dr. Gutzman also said that although Mr. Reagan employed "rhetorical attention" to such social issues as abolishing abortion, he didn't take many assertive actions to change policies.
Former ABC News White House correspondent Sam Donaldson called Mr. Reagan "intellectually lazy" in his 1987 autobiography.
Dr. Gutzman said that the former president was "a fine example of someone who could combine the roles of head of state and head of government," noting that unlike England, for example, the United States does not have both a king and head of government.
Dr. Gutzman said, for example, that Mr. Reagan delivered an "uplifting" speech to the country following the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986.
A C-SPAN poll earlier this year rated Mr. Reagan as the 10th best president of all time, compared with Bill Clinton at 15th and George H.W. Bush at 18th.
Former President George W. Bush ranked 36th.
New Milford Mayor Patricia Murphy said that she admires Mr. Reagan's accomplishments, indicating that while she was serving in the U.S. Army "people in Germany would poke fun at Jimmy Carter but took a different attitude after Ronald Reagan became president."
Rebecca Guendelsberger, the coordinator for the dinner and daughter of Republican Town Council member Robert Guendelsberger, said that although she was born in 1981, the year that he took office, she has been impressed with his accomplishments after studying Mr. Reagan in some of her undergraduate classes at Bowdoin College in Maine and hearing her father discuss the Reagan administration.
She said that the dinner, which will become an annual event, raised at least $4,500 for the Republican candidates in the Nov. 3 municipal election.
New Milford Republican campaign Chairman Pete Bass, a member of the Town Council who is seeking election to another term this fall, said that tickets were $100 each.
Attorney Kie Westby of Southbury and former gubernatorial cabinet officer Justin Bernier, the two candidates for the 2010 Republican nomination in the Fifth Congressional District, both spoke briefly about Mr. Reagan.
