The Tax-Phobia of Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan

Taxation selections from: Colin Woodard, American Character  (New York: Viking, 2016.)

p. 201 - President Ronald Reagan moved forward with a four-year, $749 billion tax cut, conceived by his budget director, David Stockman. After being literally consigned to the workhouse for his faulty budget numbers, Stockman admitted that the tax plan was designed to help the rich. The top marginal tax rate was slashed from seventy to fifty percent, estate and capital gains taxes were cut and unprecedented tax breaks were provided to business. The administration and a compliant Congress cut funds for food stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and employment, education and housing measures for the poor by over $100 billion over four years.

P. 202 - To cut the rising national debt, Reagan agreed to a three-year $98.3 billion tax hike, the largest in history, coupled with another $30 billion cut to entitlement programs. "Meanwhile, Congress and the president worked to loosen regulations, opening public lands in the West to development, weakening the oversight powers of the Federal Trade Commission, stopping new automotive safety regulations, delaying environmental rule making, and freeing the loosely regulated savings and loan industry to engage in commercial banking, while lowering each S and L's capital reserve requirements and raising their federal deposit insurance levels." The federal bailout of the S and L's cost taxpayers $125 billion over the next thirty years.

p. 203 - "In 1986, Reagan championed another round of tax cuts that lowered the top marginal tax rate from fifty to twenty-eight percent, while raising the rate of the lowest bracket from eleven to fifteen percent." This represented an enormous tax break for wealthy tax filers, who, between World War II and pre-Reagan, had never had a top marginal tax rate of less than seventy percent.

p. 204 -  President Reagan's budget cuts included a sixty percent cut in federal assistance to municipalities, forcing public schools, libraries, health clinics, hospitals and housing programs to take draconian measures.

Reagan increased the nation's debt from $914 billion to $2.6 trillion, diverting more money to interest payments. Although one of Ronald Reagan's major promises before taking office was to balance the federal budget, he created more budgetary debt than all the presidents who came before him combined.

p. 239 - "In 2012, Republican representative Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee and self-described Ayn Rand devotee, proposed a budget featuring big tax cuts for the wealthy and draconian cuts in benefits and programs for middle- and lower-income people, excluding (in a nod to the Tea Party) retirees." The Urban Institute determined Ryan's budget would cause fourteen to twenty-seven million poor people to be dropped from Medicaid, while cutting reimbursement to hospitals and doctors by thirty-one percent. Paul Ryan has proposed several budgets, all cut from the same cloth; however, one of them wouldn't have balanced the budget until the 2040s. Any budget that proposes to balance the budget a quarter-century of more in the future should not be taken seriously.

ADDENDUM:
*"A  Pew Research Center survey published two years ago found that 70% percent of 18-to-24-year-olds who use the Internet had experienced harassment, and 26% of women that age said they'd been stalked online." (Source: Joel Stein, "Tyranny of the mob," Time, August 29, 2016.)