Reagan Cuts Taxes on Rich, Puts Them on Poor

[PLYMCO_PILGRIM]

oh you know that vid is unfair. that guy is just some reporter...he has no right to ask questions of our royalty...umm...i mean our congress



sarcasm alrert

 

[Andrew2382]

In 1991, after the Reagan rate cuts were well in place, the top 1 percent of taxpayers in income paid 25 percent of all income taxes; the top 5 percent paid 43 percent; and the bottom 50 percent paid only 5 percent. To suggest that this distribution is unfair because it is too easy on upper-income groups is nothing less than absurd.

 

[Ringel05]

When you are thinking about taxes, you shouldn't be thinking whether or not they will have to be raised. Of course they will, we owe now about four times the whole amount collected each year. And the amount we spend won't be smaller, not with two wars, and a crumbling infrastructure, and ten (to 19) percent unemployment.

The question you need to ask yourself is, do you want people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Rockefellers to pay it, or do you want to pay it?

Cut from book below, the beginning of the trend of "supply-side" that has put us in this huge hole we are in now, downsizing, union detracting, immigration, and globalization, all conservative policies they refuse to even talk about on the "liberal media" these days. People like to blame Bush, but this stuff was started way back in the early eighties, and sadly, has been adopted by far too many democrats, along with nearly all republicans.
_____________________



All of this tax-cutting frenzy took place when the government had not balanced its books since the sixties and was nearly $1 trillion in debt. In 1981 Washington borrowed $125 billion, better than one of every 10 dollars the government spent that year, by selling bonds and government IOUs in the securities markets.

The champions of supply-side economics surrounding Reagan promised that lower tax rates would mean more investment and that, in turn, should always result in more economic growth, which in turn means growing tax revenues. Congress passed the biggest tax cut in history, but things didn't work out as promised, at least not in the short run.

The 1982 federal budget deficit was more than double that of the year before. The next year it grew again, to $3543 billion, approaching triple the level when Reagan took office. Washington was borrowing almost one of every three dollars it spent. Unemployment hit 10 percent, an issue the Democrats seized on to attack Reagan's economic policies.

The federal government's red-ink spending was so out of control, and so damaging to the rest of our economy, that one year after Reagan signed into law the biggest tax cut in history he had to accept a host of tax increases. Reagan would not openly acknowledge that these were tax increases and when he was finally forced to refer to them, when he signed them into law, he referred to them as "revenue enhancements." They could also have been called tax hikes on Joe Lunch pail to benefit the rich. The 1982 tax law did not raise income tax rates. Rather, there were increases in excise taxes, including a nickel-a-gallon increase on gasoline. Two decades later in the Heritage Foundation, a major promoter of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981, issued a report saying that excise taxes hit the poor hardest and ought to be scaled back.

In 1983 though, public attention was diverted from the immediate fiscal crisis by reports out of Washington that Social Security was in trouble, deep trouble. The idea that upon their retirement, Social Security might not be around anymore worried many people. Letters and calls flooded the offices of politicians and the issue was in the news day after day.

For the Reagan White House fears about Social Security's solvency diverted attention from the government's immediate solvency. It also turned attention away from Reagan's attitude toward the millions of people without jobs, summarized in his denigrating criticism of news reports on the subject: "Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?"

Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Elsepp. 120-121

The book goes on to talk about how during Reagan's years, with a Democratic Congress I might woefully add, that FICA taxes, more commonly known as Social Security Taxes were raised to pay for a problem that was partly caused by the huge unemployment rate during Reagan's years. The late Senator Moynihan referred to the S.S tax hike as "thievery" from the lower classes to pay for the huge tax cuts given to the rich, the political donor class.

Good book, one which know-it-alls (but really know-nothings) like CFTR should think of reading.

You seem to be getting all your information from one source and one source only. If you even attended collage I hope you didn't try to use single source references to justify your papers. Because if you did you should not have passed any courses and/or graduated, and if you did pass and graduate that speaks volumes concerning higher education anywhere in the world.

 

[edthecynic]

Pal of Poor are in in favor of a flat tax or a "Sales" only tax that way everyone has the same burden as a percentage of their income?

Or do you favor a sliding tax scale where the more you make the larger a percentage you have to pay?


I ask because the top 10% of the wealthy actually pay over 90% of the total tax revenue that the IRS takes in.

Tax Statistics - Produced by the Statistics of Income Division and Other Areas of the Internal Revenue Service

You NEVER read any of the links you post. You just mindlessly parrot the lies of GOP Hate-Run media.

The WEALTHY don't pay taxes on their wealth.

The top 10% of income earners paid 63.7% of all INCOME tax paid and 48.3% of ALL FEDERAL taxes paid in 2008.

The Truth About Taxes
August 6, 2007
RUSH: I've told you before: the income tax is designed to keep people like his [Buffett's] secretary from becoming wealthy! There is no "wealth" tax. So this is a big misnomer. ...
But there's no tax on wealth. There is a tax on income, and the tax on income is designed to keep everybody who is not wealthy from getting there.
I'm talking about genuine wealth, not the way Democrats define "rich."

Another link that doesn't contain the direct irs numbers, if you search, like the other one for edthecynic

You really suck at economics man. I'm done trying to educate you with facts and will just put you on the backburner now.

Enjoy the link

EDIT: Oh here i clicked the other link and found the information within 1 min there scarecrowhttp://www.irs.gov/taxstats/indtaxstats/article/0,,id=129270,00.html

Your "links" provide nothing. YOU "found" nothing.

Below is a link to the CBO report. Download the easily readable PDF and go to Table 2 on pgs 18 and 19.

Read it and weep!

[PDF] A P A P E R

Effective Federal Tax Rates
Under Current Law, 2001 to 2014

Tax legislation enacted in 2001, 2002, and 2003 is
scheduled to phase in, phase out, and “sunset” entirely af-
ter 2010. As a result, federal tax rules will differ in every
year from 2001 through 2011 and, consequently, so will
effective tax rates—which are the total federal taxes that
people bear measured as a percentage of their income. Be-
cause provisions have different impacts on people with
different income and because those provisions change
from year to year, effective tax rates fall and rise in pat-
terns that vary over both time and income quintiles (or
fifths of the distribution).

 

[edthecynic]

Reagan did across the board tax cuts, when you tax the wealthy you tax the JOB CREATORS. It is trickle down, the more money any of us has to spend save and invest, the more WE grow the economy and create more jobs. The government creats and produces NOTHING, but more debt.

Reagan passed his "across the board" tax cuts in Aug 1981. Unemployment was 7.4%, it proceeded to RISE steadily to 10.8% by Nov 1982.
So much for "trickle down" job creation.
Reagan then signed 8 tax increases in 6 years and unemployment FELL to 5.3% by Dec 1988.

 

[Ringel05]

Reagan did across the board tax cuts, when you tax the wealthy you tax the JOB CREATORS. It is trickle down, the more money any of us has to spend save and invest, the more WE grow the economy and create more jobs. The government creats and produces NOTHING, but more debt.

Reagan passed his "across the board" tax cuts in Aug 1981. Unemployment was 7.4%, it proceeded to RISE steadily to 10.8% by Nov 1982.
So much for "trickle down" job creation.
Reagan then signed 8 tax increases in 6 years and unemployment FELL to 5.3% by Dec 1988.

Are you specifically claiming cause and effect? Do you have specific knowledege these weren't attributable to normal market fluxuations?

 

[Andrew2382]

Are you really going to try and say something negative about Reagen's economy?

This economic boom lasted 92 months without a recession, from November 1982 to July 1990, the longest period of sustained growth during peacetime and the second-longest period of sustained growth in U.S. history. The growth in the economy lasted more than twice as long as the average period of expansions since World War II

The American economy grew by about one-third in real inflation-adjusted terms. This was the equivalent of adding the entire economy of East and West Germany or two-thirds of Japan's economy to the U.S. economy.

From 1950 to 1973, real economic growth in the U.S. economy averaged 3.6 percent per year. From 1973 to 1982, it averaged only 1.6 percent. The Reagan economic boom restored the more usual growth rate as the economy averaged 3.5 percent in real growth from the beginning of 1983 to the end of 1990

Employment growth was very strong during both the Reagan and Clinton years, but in terms of percentage change in the total number of jobs, Reagan beat out Mr. Clinton by 3 points. As a matter of fact, Clinton's biggest economic gains were in his second term when he CUT taxes and adopted Reagan principles...The irony for Clinton is that he almost certainly would have achieved an economy that outperformed Reagan if only he had not raised income tax rates in his first term. He was too much a prisoner of left-wing orthodoxy to follow the empirical evidence of Reagan's success.

 

[edthecynic]

Reagan did across the board tax cuts, when you tax the wealthy you tax the JOB CREATORS. It is trickle down, the more money any of us has to spend save and invest, the more WE grow the economy and create more jobs. The government creats and produces NOTHING, but more debt.

Reagan passed his "across the board" tax cuts in Aug 1981. Unemployment was 7.4%, it proceeded to RISE steadily to 10.8% by Nov 1982.
So much for "trickle down" job creation.
Reagan then signed 8 tax increases in 6 years and unemployment FELL to 5.3% by Dec 1988.

Are you specifically claiming cause and effect? Do you have specific knowledege these weren't attributable to normal market fluxuations?

Are you really going to try and say something negative about Reagen's economy?

This economic boom lasted 92 months without a recession, from November 1982 to July 1990, the longest period of sustained growth during peacetime and the second-longest period of sustained growth in U.S. history. The growth in the economy lasted more than twice as long as the average period of expansions since World War II

The American economy grew by about one-third in real inflation-adjusted terms. This was the equivalent of adding the entire economy of East and West Germany or two-thirds of Japan's economy to the U.S. economy.

From 1950 to 1973, real economic growth in the U.S. economy averaged 3.6 percent per year. From 1973 to 1982, it averaged only 1.6 percent. The Reagan economic boom restored the more usual growth rate as the economy averaged 3.5 percent in real growth from the beginning of 1983 to the end of 1990

Employment growth was very strong during both the Reagan and Clinton years, but in terms of percentage change in the total number of jobs, Reagan beat out Mr. Clinton by 3 points. As a matter of fact, Clinton's biggest economic gains were in his second term when he CUT taxes and adopted Reagan principles...The irony for Clinton is that he almost certainly would have achieved an economy that outperformed Reagan if only he had not raised income tax rates in his first term. He was too much a prisoner of left-wing orthodoxy to follow the empirical evidence of Reagan's success.

Reagan didn't take office in 1983, he began in Jan 1981, so stats starting from 1983 are deliberately misleading.

And I love how the increased unemployment following Reagan's tax cuts were normal market fluctuations and had nothing to do with his tax cuts, and the booming economy after Reagan's 8 tax increases from the end of 1982 to 1987 had nothing to do with with his tax increases or market fluctuations but were due to the 1981 tax cuts.

In the four years following the Clinton tax hike (from 1993 through 1996) The economy grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent in inflation-adjusted terms and Employment rose by 11.6 million jobs, good STEADY growth by any standard.
In 1997 the GOP congress cut Cap Gains taxes and created boom and bust market, whose bubble burst within 4 years. Bush also cut Cap Gains taxes and gave us another boom and bust market that when the bubble burst in 2008 put us Right back to where we were in 1997.

 

[Ringel05]

Reagan passed his "across the board" tax cuts in Aug 1981. Unemployment was 7.4%, it proceeded to RISE steadily to 10.8% by Nov 1982.
So much for "trickle down" job creation.
Reagan then signed 8 tax increases in 6 years and unemployment FELL to 5.3% by Dec 1988.

Are you specifically claiming cause and effect? Do you have specific knowledege these weren't attributable to normal market fluxuations?

Are you really going to try and say something negative about Reagen's economy?

This economic boom lasted 92 months without a recession, from November 1982 to July 1990, the longest period of sustained growth during peacetime and the second-longest period of sustained growth in U.S. history. The growth in the economy lasted more than twice as long as the average period of expansions since World War II

The American economy grew by about one-third in real inflation-adjusted terms. This was the equivalent of adding the entire economy of East and West Germany or two-thirds of Japan's economy to the U.S. economy.

From 1950 to 1973, real economic growth in the U.S. economy averaged 3.6 percent per year. From 1973 to 1982, it averaged only 1.6 percent. The Reagan economic boom restored the more usual growth rate as the economy averaged 3.5 percent in real growth from the beginning of 1983 to the end of 1990

Employment growth was very strong during both the Reagan and Clinton years, but in terms of percentage change in the total number of jobs, Reagan beat out Mr. Clinton by 3 points. As a matter of fact, Clinton's biggest economic gains were in his second term when he CUT taxes and adopted Reagan principles...The irony for Clinton is that he almost certainly would have achieved an economy that outperformed Reagan if only he had not raised income tax rates in his first term. He was too much a prisoner of left-wing orthodoxy to follow the empirical evidence of Reagan's success.

Reagan didn't take office in 1983, he began in Jan 1981, so stats starting from 1983 are deliberately misleading.

And I love how the increased unemployment following Reagan's tax cuts were normal market fluctuations and had nothing to do with his tax cuts, and the booming economy after Reagan's 8 tax increases from the end of 1982 to 1987 had nothing to do with with his tax increases or market fluctuations but were due to the 1981 tax cuts.

In the four years following the Clinton tax hike (from 1993 through 1996) The economy grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent in inflation-adjusted terms and Employment rose by 11.6 million jobs, good STEADY growth by any standard.
In 1997 the GOP congress cut Cap Gains taxes and created boom and bust market, whose bubble burst within 4 years. Bush also cut Cap Gains taxes and gave us another boom and bust market that when the bubble burst in 2008 put us Right back to where we were in 1997.

I asked a simple reasonable question, because I didn't know and was looking for you to validate your statement. And your response is that?! I've never said this to anyone on this forum so you're the first and hopefully the last: Go fuck yourself asshole.

 

[Sinatra]

Are you really going to try and say something negative about Reagen's economy?

This economic boom lasted 92 months without a recession, from November 1982 to July 1990, the longest period of sustained growth during peacetime and the second-longest period of sustained growth in U.S. history. The growth in the economy lasted more than twice as long as the average period of expansions since World War II

The American economy grew by about one-third in real inflation-adjusted terms. This was the equivalent of adding the entire economy of East and West Germany or two-thirds of Japan's economy to the U.S. economy.

From 1950 to 1973, real economic growth in the U.S. economy averaged 3.6 percent per year. From 1973 to 1982, it averaged only 1.6 percent. The Reagan economic boom restored the more usual growth rate as the economy averaged 3.5 percent in real growth from the beginning of 1983 to the end of 1990

Employment growth was very strong during both the Reagan and Clinton years, but in terms of percentage change in the total number of jobs, Reagan beat out Mr. Clinton by 3 points. As a matter of fact, Clinton's biggest economic gains were in his second term when he CUT taxes and adopted Reagan principles...The irony for Clinton is that he almost certainly would have achieved an economy that outperformed Reagan if only he had not raised income tax rates in his first term. He was too much a prisoner of left-wing orthodoxy to follow the empirical evidence of Reagan's success.

Amen!

Both the Clinton and Reagan economies were strong, but where Reagan took the country back from the economic brink, Clinton simply veered more toward the center, and adjusted with a newly elected Republican Congress. Many of the Clinton jobs were directly linked to the tech boom which of course, would correct itself with its own bubble.

While I place Reagan as one of the greats, I also place Clinton as a solid president whose pragmatic approach to leadership served the country well for the most part. He was personally a very weak and flawed man - and consequently, could have been a much more effective leader, but as such, his eight years were good ones for the most part. He should have done more against the rising tide of terrorism, but hindsight is far easier than reacting at the moment.

At present, I would certainly take Clinton over Obama - though as the nation appears to be sinking into the morass, we likely need an even stronger and more inspired hand equivilent to that of Reagan to lead us back from the current brink.

 

[Andrew2382]

also Reagan took over an economy with double-digit inflation and almost no growth, yet left office with much lower inflation than he inherited and a strongly growing economy. Clinton, by contrast, took over a relatively low inflation, moderately growing economy, and left it in recession. Clinton left in January 2001, and the recession began in that quarter, before George Bush or Congress were able to make any changes in tax, spending or regulatory policy.

 

[midcan5]

Reagan raised taxes, he had the largest peace time increase ever. Seems even 'the myth' knew you have to pay for society if you want it to be more than a third world banana republic.

Posting articles on raising taxes to the wingnuts who live life by slogan is a waste, they haven't a clue when it comes to economics, they only know that tired free market hooey. They are closer to marxist than to reality, as 'all you need is money,' 'all you need is money' and soon viola! utopia. Simple ideas for the wingnut's simple mind. For others consider below.

The statistics in this piece give a sense of potential.

What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You? Peter Singer

"What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a human life."

What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?, by Peter Singer

And don't forget.

"The U.S. spends over $600 billion annually on our military, more than the rest of the world combined. China, our nearest competitor, spends about one-tenth of what we spend. The U.S. also sells more weapons to other countries than any other nation in the world.

The U.S. has about 700 military bases in 130 countries world-wide and another 6000 bases in the US and our territories, according to Chalmers Johnson in his excellent book Nemesis: The Last Days Of The American Republic (2007).

The Department of Defense (DOD) reports nearly 1.4 million active duty military personnel today. Over a quarter of a million are in other countries from Iraq and Afghanistan to Europe, North Africa, South Asia and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. The DOD also employs more than 700,000 civilian employees."

Bill Quigley: War Immemorial Day

 

[PLYMCO_PILGRIM]

Your "links" provide nothing. YOU "found" nothing.

Below is a link to the CBO report. Download the easily readable PDF and go to Table 2 on pgs 18 and 19.

Read it and weep!

[PDF] A P A P E R

Effective Federal Tax Rates
Under Current Law, 2001 to 2014

Tax legislation enacted in 2001, 2002, and 2003 is
scheduled to phase in, phase out, and “sunset” entirely af-
ter 2010. As a result, federal tax rules will differ in every
year from 2001 through 2011 and, consequently, so will
effective tax rates—which are the total federal taxes that
people bear measured as a percentage of their income. Be-
cause provisions have different impacts on people with
different income and because those provisions change
from year to year, effective tax rates fall and rise in pat-
terns that vary over both time and income quintiles (or
fifths of the distribution).

I'm sorry I just assumed you had an education in economics and would be able to comprehend the various links from the IRS or the numbers in the article i linked for you. I wont continue trying to show since you dont want to see it.

As far as read it and weep? yes the cuts expiring suck for me. I make a five figure salary and when the bush tax cuts expire my tax liability will go up $1,100/year. ~3% increase in my taxes.

I feel bad for those making less than 35,000/year as the bush tax cuts made their federal tax liability zero.

its an old chart but the blue numbers are what we revert back to when the cuts expire​

Your a real jerk for celebrating the tax cuts expiring, you are happy that EVERY person posting in this forum is going to get a tax increase. What a douchebag!!!

 

[edthecynic]

Originally Posted by PLYMCO_PILGRIM
I ask because the top 10% of the wealthy actually pay over 90% of the total tax revenue that the IRS takes in.

Originally Posted by edthecynic
The top 10% of income earners paid 63.7% of all INCOME tax paid and 48.3% of ALL FEDERAL taxes paid in 2008.

Your "links" provide nothing. YOU "found" nothing.

Below is a link to the CBO report. Download the easily readable PDF and go to Table 2 on pgs 18 and 19.

Read it and weep!

[PDF] A P A P E R

Effective Federal Tax Rates
Under Current Law, 2001 to 2014

Tax legislation enacted in 2001, 2002, and 2003 is
scheduled to phase in, phase out, and “sunset” entirely af-
ter 2010. As a result, federal tax rules will differ in every
year from 2001 through 2011 and, consequently, so will
effective tax rates—which are the total federal taxes that
people bear measured as a percentage of their income. Be-
cause provisions have different impacts on people with
different income and because those provisions change
from year to year, effective tax rates fall and rise in pat-
terns that vary over both time and income quintiles (or
fifths of the distribution).

I'm sorry I just assumed you had an education in economics and would be able to comprehend the various links from the IRS or the numbers in the article i linked for you. I wont continue trying to show since you dont want to see it.

As far as read it and weep? yes the cuts expiring suck for me. I make a five figure salary and when the bush tax cuts expire my tax liability will go up $1,100/year. ~3% increase in my taxes.

I feel bad for those making less than 35,000/year as the bush tax cuts made their federal tax liability zero.

its an old chart but the blue numbers are what we revert back to when the cuts expire​

Your a real jerk for celebrating the tax cuts expiring, you are happy that EVERY person posting in this forum is going to get a tax increase. What a douchebag!!!

You couldn't be a CON$ervative without your arrogant condescension!!!
Nor could you be a CON$ervative without the dumb act and a Straw Man.

Your IRS links were to unreadable Excel docs that can only be opened with the proper program, but never having used your own links which you merely C & P from some CON$ervative site, you didn't know that.

And my universally readable PDF link was provided to show your "90%" Crapaganda was made up out of the blue, thus your Straw Man.

Nowhere did I "celebrate" the tax cuts expiring, in fact, I'm on record on many other threads as wanting to replace Bush's tax cuts DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR with cuts in SS and FICA tax cuts. Just ask DumbCon.

Fallacy: Straw Man ​

Description of Straw Man

The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:

1. 
   [*]Person A has position X.
   [*]Person B presents position Y.
   [*]Person B attacks position Y.
   [*]Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.

This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.

 

[garyd]

Okay you really want to help the poor you do that by creating jobs not through taxing the hell out of everyone who isn't poor. You create jobs by leaving people sufficient money to invest in small business making it possible for people to expand their business. Not by taxing hell out of the job creators.

By the way under Reagan and Bush a hell of a lot of poor people were removed from the tax rolls so it is really hard to make the case that the taxes on the poor were increased under Reagan. then again another problem for the left is that they seem to believe that there are only to economic classes in this country the poor and the uber Rich.

 

[Chris]

When you are thinking about taxes, you shouldn't be thinking whether or not they will have to be raised. Of course they will, we owe now about four times the whole amount collected each year. And the amount we spend won't be smaller, not with two wars, and a crumbling infrastructure, and ten (to 19) percent unemployment.

The question you need to ask yourself is, do you want people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Rockefellers to pay it, or do you want to pay it?

Cut from book below, the beginning of the trend of "supply-side" that has put us in this huge hole we are in now, downsizing, union detracting, immigration, and globalization, all conservative policies they refuse to even talk about on the "liberal media" these days. People like to blame Bush, but this stuff was started way back in the early eighties, and sadly, has been adopted by far too many democrats, along with nearly all republicans.
_____________________



All of this tax-cutting frenzy took place when the government had not balanced its books since the sixties and was nearly $1 trillion in debt. In 1981 Washington borrowed $125 billion, better than one of every 10 dollars the government spent that year, by selling bonds and government IOUs in the securities markets.

The champions of supply-side economics surrounding Reagan promised that lower tax rates would mean more investment and that, in turn, should always result in more economic growth, which in turn means growing tax revenues. Congress passed the biggest tax cut in history, but things didn't work out as promised, at least not in the short run.

The 1982 federal budget deficit was more than double that of the year before. The next year it grew again, to $3543 billion, approaching triple the level when Reagan took office. Washington was borrowing almost one of every three dollars it spent. Unemployment hit 10 percent, an issue the Democrats seized on to attack Reagan's economic policies.

The federal government's red-ink spending was so out of control, and so damaging to the rest of our economy, that one year after Reagan signed into law the biggest tax cut in history he had to accept a host of tax increases. Reagan would not openly acknowledge that these were tax increases and when he was finally forced to refer to them, when he signed them into law, he referred to them as "revenue enhancements." They could also have been called tax hikes on Joe Lunch pail to benefit the rich. The 1982 tax law did not raise income tax rates. Rather, there were increases in excise taxes, including a nickel-a-gallon increase on gasoline. Two decades later in the Heritage Foundation, a major promoter of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981, issued a report saying that excise taxes hit the poor hardest and ought to be scaled back.

In 1983 though, public attention was diverted from the immediate fiscal crisis by reports out of Washington that Social Security was in trouble, deep trouble. The idea that upon their retirement, Social Security might not be around anymore worried many people. Letters and calls flooded the offices of politicians and the issue was in the news day after day.

For the Reagan White House fears about Social Security's solvency diverted attention from the government's immediate solvency. It also turned attention away from Reagan's attitude toward the millions of people without jobs, summarized in his denigrating criticism of news reports on the subject: "Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?"

Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Elsepp. 120-121

The book goes on to talk about how during Reagan's years, with a Democratic Congress I might woefully add, that FICA taxes, more commonly known as Social Security Taxes were raised to pay for a problem that was partly caused by the huge unemployment rate during Reagan's years. The late Senator Moynihan referred to the S.S tax hike as "thievery" from the lower classes to pay for the huge tax cuts given to the rich, the political donor class.

Good book, one which know-it-alls (but really know-nothings) like CFTR should think of reading.

Reagan and Bush cut taxes for the rich and created massive deficits to fund ridiculous military spending.

Reagan's budget director David Stockman called Reagan's tax cuts a "trojan horse" to lower taxes on the rich.

 

[Polk]

I'm still trying to figure out where this crazy "tax cuts pay for themselves by increasing revenues" myth came from.

the "myth" came from the tax revenu data....many sources right here SOI Tax Stats - IRS Data Book

Revenue Act of 1964: 9% full-year decline
Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981: 13.3% decline in federal revenues over the first four years
Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001: 3.6% decline
Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003: 2.5% decline

http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/tax-policy/library/ota81.pdf