antagon
The Man
- Dec 6, 2009
- 3,572
- 295
- 48
maple, trickle down economics never increased government revenue; it was supposed to, but instead began an all-but-clinton debt-building extraveganza. reagan can be credited with many things, and i would call him a great president, but by 1984, he was hacking up massive deficit spending behind the tax breaks you laud him for. by 87 the markets had enough. it also precipitated the S&L crisis. familliar? the reagan recovery was the first of the contemporary 'jobless recoveries', what you hack at obama for.
trickle-down economics never worked, not in england, not in the US. i think there was just too much tax pre '79, and there was room to improve. reagan, certainly dubya, went overboard and borrowed japanese or chinese money to do this retarded trickling with. statistically, it never did the 'down' part to where the middle class could appreciate it. it is the middle class you want to target directly with all the preference the government can offer, how i see it.
sealybobo makes some good points, but he can go to hell with that union bullshit. that has nothing to do with american prosperity, quality of life, or worker's rights at this point. that 25% would constitute a labor elite with their own corrupt corporate hierarchy.
furthermore, wealthy people arent out to getchya or any of that 'corporate greed' nonesense. there's a case for progressive taxation and all of that, but nobody's out to punish the wealthy. we're not the second highest corporate tax environment on the planet like the maples out there think. they may have never left the country, perhaps. we are one of the best, perhaps the best, environment for business - something we've got to protect for the benefit of all americans.
I respectfully disagree with your post. For one, I lived through the Jimmy Carter years and I also grew up during the cold war where we had air-raid sirens go off once a month on Fridays and we kids were told to crawl under our desks in case of a Russian nuclear attack. We were taught to do this. It was a constant fear in our community as I live very close to Norad, the defense command center for entire U.S and Canada. We were always told that our city was the number 1 hit for a nuclear bomb. You people are probably too young to remember, but it is something I will never forget. I lived it.
Reagan ended that cold war without firing one shot, yes he ran up the deficit and out spent the Russians on defense, they caved and fell as a nation, no longer able to keep up with our defense spending and no longer the threat they used to be.
Reagan inherited a deep recession from Jimmy Carter, the weakest President in history only to be surpassed by Obama in the near future. I remember, because I lived through it, 21% interest rates on mortgage loans, 14% inflation, very high unemployment. It was misery and it was shared misery by the entire nation.
Reagan spent 8 months after he was elected and passed an across the board tax cut, that stimulated the economy creating 20 million new jobs, with more people back to work and more people paying taxes he increased government revenue.
I never stated that he did not deficit spend to accomplish this, but what he did achieve was a great thing through deficit spending, which lead eventually to a balanced budget during Clinton's term.
What we see currently is a whole bunch of deficit spending that is doing little to nothing to create private sector jobs and instead is going to study why " pigs stink" in Iowa.
There'r your difference and it is night and day.
i made a point to say reagan was a great president, and for many of the reasons you'd pointed out, specifically in contrast to carter's and pre-reagan tax ethics. i couldnt control my bowels or walk 10 feet without falling when reagan was elected, and i could only remember how the mid eighties was. my parents were rabid republicans at the time, and partly because of reagan (the rabid part)
i gotta challenge you on the employment record. he had the where's the jobs syndrome for years and years, a way trickle-down did not work. that was the beginning of an era, for better or worse, that the economy's performance was based on the fairly wealthy's investment behavior in stocks and debt, rather than jobs and tangible productivity. we've got a diverse economy, despite that, but similar policy under thatcher has specialized their economy to the banking and investment sector to the degree that theyre still in a contraction phase a couple months since we started to expand here.
i think its fetching to tie reagans deficit spending legacy to clinton's budget responsibility. i tie it to bush's disregard for deficit. he did a lot of 'worked for reagan' moves, but without the insight reagan shown. with war, for example.