Roughly this time a year ago, inspired by the insanity that was the 2008 presidential race, I started working on Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. With a target publication date right before the Gipper's 98th birthday (or Reagan Day as modern conservatives have declared it), I did have one nagging worry. What if a decisive election victory last November by Barack Obama and congressional Democrats appeared to slay the Reagan myth for once and for all -- ushering in an Age of Aquarius in which government took a rational view of science, adopted economy policies that would actually help the middle class, and promoted a foreign policy in which our deeds matched our lofty rhetoric.
Silly me! Just like the bell in the Polar Express, the Reagan myth still rings for at least 37 Republican senators and 188 GOP House members, as it does for all who truly believe in the right-wing blather of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. And it's echoed by a lazy inside-the-Beltway press corps that came of age during the halcyon days of the 1980s and remains falsely convinced that America is a center-right nation, despite a slew of polls and election results to the contrary.
The Reagan myth was sold so successfully to the party's base by the likes of lobbyist and GOP point man Grover Norquist -- who founded the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997, in the dog days of the booming Clinton-era economy -- that too many Republicans really do believe that a tax cut is the solution to every problem, whether the nation has a budget surplus or a deficit, in times of war or peace, when the economy is booming or when Great Depression II looms.
Before this year's debate, the most bizarre manifestation came in 2003 when the Bush administration pushed through a tax cut even though America was engaged in two wars. Iowa Republican Jim Nussle, who headed the House Budget Committee at that time, explained "the basic playbook" on taxes is the one authored by Reagan, "and that is the one that I follow today." Meanwhile, one study found that nearly three-quarters of the whopping rise of nearly $4 trillion in national debt during the presidency of George W. Bush was attributable to two things: the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the size of his tax cuts.
When President Barack Obama, both as a 2008 candidate and now as commander-in-chief, declared it was high time to end the folly that tax cuts are the only solution to the nation's woes, this is how South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint responded: "It's incredible that he said that. It's clear that whether it's John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan or when Bush did this in 2001 and 2003, the economy came out of recession." But the evidence for that argument just isn't there.
In the case of Reagan's massive 1981 tax cut, it did start the great divergence of wealth between the very affluent and the middle class in this country, but it didn't save the American economy, which actually slid into a deep recession the next 15 months. When the economy finally reversed in the mid-1980s, it was the predicted bounce-back in the business cycle (even Reagan's budget chief David Stockman said so), a steep drop in global oil prices, and the inflation-fighting tight-money policies of then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker, an appointee of Jimmy Carter who today is a top adviser to Barack Obama. And yet the Ronald Reagan myth and the hanging-by-a-thread 41 Senate Republicans have foisted a recovery program on America that is too weighed down by more tax cuts, and spends far too little on the nation's crumbling infrastructure, on mass transit, on green energy.
History matters. To set a new economic course for America, Democrats including the Obama administration won't just have to win the daily news-cycle wars of the present. They will need to dig deeper, and recapture the past as well.
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There is no causal connection between his policies and the economic expansion of the ensuing 25 years. Once interest rates started coming down from their stratospheric levels of the early 80's the rise in value of debt instruments created instant wealth for debt owners like banks and financial institutions. Sadly, Reaganomics sowed the seeds of our current calamity by initiating a long term slide in the real earnings of the lower income brackets, ultimately paving the way for the orgy of borrowing (to finance consumption) that has us on the brink of destruction.
The contractor starts off his day with a visit to the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier before catching a flight to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. From the airport he takes a car to the Ronald Reagan Republican Center on Capitol Hill for a fundraiser followed by lunch a few blocks away at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Building...where the hypothetical contractor chokes on his chicken and is rushed to the Ronald Reagan Emergency Medical Center where he unfortunately dies and some time later his ashes are taken to New Hampshire and spread over Mount Reagan.
Robert Reich wrote a book 20 years ago about the Reagan myths and I still have that book and look forward to buying this book... We Dems have blood on our hands since we allowed this mess to evolve... Every one KNEW there were toxic asset and a real estate bubble....
Clinton raised taxes and the economy expanded dramatically. That alone disproves these silly, superficial farces that raygun-ites want to perpetuate. The fact is that the economy is NOT tied to tax rates.
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"When you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat." -- Reagan
"The reason we start a war is to fight a war, win a war, thereby causing no more war!" -- Dubya
"All great change in America begins at the dinner table." -- Reagan
"You're working hard to put food on your family." -- Dubya
"All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk." -- Reagan
Dubya "playfully" looking for WMDs at a Correspondents' dinner.
"Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years." -- Reagan
Going to college offered Dubya the chance to practice his cheerleading skills (useful for promoting a future Iraq War)
"If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen." -- Reagan
[Not if you listen to Rush's or Coulter's comments]. Let's ask the Dixie Chicks about the ridicule they got.
"It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?" -- Reagan
Seems to be the Republican mantra; as Repub Presidents ALWAYS take the MOST vacation days...!
"One picture is worth 1,000 denials." -- Reagan
Let's check with Rumsfeld about those Abu Ghraib photos.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/19980302/corn
"The firing of the air traffic controllers, winnable nuclear war, recallable nuclear missiles, trees that cause pollution, Elliott Abrams lying to Congress, ketchup as a vegetable, colluding with Guatemalan thugs, pardons for F.B.I. lawbreakers, voodoo economics, budget deficits, toasts to Ferdinand Marcos, public housing cutbacks, redbaiting the nuclear freeze movement, James Watt.
"Getting cozy with Argentine fascist generals, tax credits for segregated schools, disinformation campaigns, 'homeless by choice,' Manuel Noriega, falling wages, the HUD scandal, air raids on Libya, 'constructive engagement' with apartheid South Africa, United States Information Agency blacklists of liberal speakers, attacks on OSHA and workplace safety, the invasion of Grenada, assassination manuals, Nancy's astrologer.
"Drug tests, lie detector tests, Fawn Hall, female appointees (8 percent), mining harbors, the S&L scandal, 239 dead U.S. troops in Beirut, Al Haig 'in control,' silence on AIDS, food-stamp reductions, Debategate, White House shredding, Jonas Savimbi, tax cuts for the rich, 'mistakes were made.' "
OpEd writer Joe Strupp wrote "...the overwhelming praise for a president who plunged the nation into its worst deficit ever, ignored and cut public money for the poor, while also ignoring the AIDS crisis...slashing federal grants for poor students and cutting survivor benefits for families of the disabled."
http://www.actupny.org/reports/reagan.html
I am so glad that someone took the time to disarm the Reaganites and burst their mythological bubble regarding their love affair with the trickle down theory.
No matter what the problems facing our nation, the only solution the Reagan folks ever come up with are tax cuts, need a cure for cancer, no problem, tax cuts, unemployment raging out of control, no problem, tax cuts, need to end poverty in America, tax cuts, want to end wars forever, you got it, tax cuts.
I have always been extremely annoyed by their hatred of government, which in an elected representative government, is actually hatred of we the people, and their simplistic ideological approach to governing, in essence these Reagan, Rush, Hannity types are basically, greedy, selfish Americans who believe strongly in every person for themselves, once they have climbed the ladder to success, they want to remove the ladder that helped get them to the top.
Finally, we are on the path to a more egalitarian society, where we now realize that we are stronger as a nation when we are united as a people. It will not be easy to stay on this path as the GOP Reagan Ideologues are putting every obstacle imaginable in our way to try to save their avaricious, self centered corporate welfare, corrupt philosophy, thank goodness we now have an intellect with compassion for all Americans, in the white house.
"By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever."
http://www.liberalslikechrist.org/about/Reagan.html
Reagan also spawned the neocons, and their ideas (high tech military, global hegemony) that got us into so much trouble over past 8 years.
But while Reagonomics (and the neocon ideas he made possible) live on, an every darker shadow is 9/11. I'm calling for Obama to reopen the investigation. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-rossi/obama-reopen-the-911-inve_b_165849.html
Cite you here, Will: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-rossi/obama-reopen-the-911-inve_b_166025.html