I'm always fascinated by the image of Reagan? Having just finished a book on Carter and Reagan, I have to say Reagan was bad even as he raised taxes over and over again, and worked in a bipartisan manner to keep Social Security solvent.
Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Each accomplished policies that made America a stable place, not a perfect place for sure. Washington established the parameters of president and the importance of government, Lincoln recognized the dignity of all and fought for it, FDR fought both depression and a war and established a system of government that created our golden years, Johnson created healthcare and civil rights that allowed Lincoln's work to continue. President Obama, had he started earlier, when he had congress, could have done much more but the ACA is certainly a great accomplishment.
"Itās conservative lore that Reagan the icon cut taxes, while George H.W. Bush the renegade raised them. As Stockman recalls, "No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reaganās watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was." Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willinglyābut he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous yearās reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hikeāthe largest since World War IIāwas actually "tax reform" that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didnāt count as raising taxes.)
Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservativesāand probably cost Reaganās successor, George H.W. Bush, reelectionāReagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84."
Newsflash: Ronald Reagan Raised Taxes (You Idiots) - Shadowproof
Worst Presidents Of All Time
Reagan and Taxes
Do you believe that Capitalism requires 5.5% unemployment?
"The predictable results can be summarized in poverty statistics. From 1960 to 1970, as the New Deal expanded into the Great Society, the number of Americans in poverty declined from 40 million to under 25 million. During the 1970s, after the rise of dog whistle politics but before its full hijacking by rightwing oligarchs, the numbers in poverty remained steady.
During the 1980s, as Reagan and then George H.W. Bush reigned, those in poverty soared to 35 million. At the end of Clinton's second term in 2000, those mired in poverty had fallen to just above 30 million. But following the Great Recession that marked the end George W. Bush's presidency, over 46 million Americans were in poverty." That's an additional 16 million good folks pushed into the material and emotional hardship of destitution in just one decade.
This book's subtitle suggests that race-baiting wrecks the middle class, as indeed it does. This is not, however, to claim that the purpose behind racial demagoguery is to destroy average Americans-it is not. The point, for politicians such as Wallace and Nixon, was to get elected and re-elected. Simultaneously, big money came to see dog whistling as a way to promote policies that favored society's sultans. These policies are, roughly, the same policies advocated by the malefactors of great wealth during the era of the robber baron: low taxes, a minimal or non-existent social safety net, and corporate control over the regulation of industry. These were, of course, policies that voters had repudiated during the New Deal as well as in the sweeping defeat of Barry Goldwater. Through their newly muscled think tanks and aided by Ronald Reagan, however, the modern plutocrats reintroduced these prescriptions to the American public as a response to the excesses of the civil rights era. Their aim was not to wreck the middle class, but to convince average Americans to support policies that transferred wealth and power to the already extremely wealthy and powerful. Like the nonwhites injured by dog whistle racism, the middle class was not a target-just collateral damage." p74,75 'Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class' by Ian Haney LĆ³pez
