Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Distorting Reagan’s Record
Did Ronald Reagan raise taxes or cut them?
Ira Stoll | July 18, 2011
Remember the big Reagan tax increase of 1982?
Well, certain elements of the press do, all of a sudden, and, lo and behold, after years of demonizing Ronald Reagan as a fiscally irresponsible tax-cutter, they are now trying to resurrect the Gipper as a tax increaser.
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It’s so absurd it’s almost funny. If ordinary Americans remember President Reagan as a tax-cutter rather than a tax-raiser, it’s not because they are victims of some kind of elaborate deception perpetrated by the Great Communicator. It’s because President Reagan, well, cut tax rates.
Even the left-leaning web site Slate didn’t buy the 1982-biggest-peacetime-tax-increase in history line when it was used against one of its congressional creators, Sen. Robert Dole, in the 1996 presidential campaign. Slate said, “most of Dole’s tax increase was actually the partial repeal of future tax cuts that had been enacted in 1981 but had not yet taken place. Despite Dole’s bill, taxpayers received more than $375 billion in tax cuts over the following three years… Almost $50 billion of Dole’s 1982 projected revenue was supposed to come from cracking down on tax cheats, by adding staff to the IRS, and requiring financial institutions to withhold interest and dividends the way employers withhold wages. (This provision was repealed the next year, before it could take effect.) Is getting people to pay taxes they already owe but would otherwise escape a ‘tax increase’?”
As for President Reagan himself, on the weekend he was supposedly signing the biggest peacetime tax increase in American history, his only public comment on the tax question came in a radio address from Rancho del Cielo. And that speech wasn’t exactly one in which he patted himself on the back for doing the supposedly fiscally responsible thing, bucking his party’s base, and raising taxes. “I’m convinced that in these last few decades the increased intervention by government in the marketplace, tax policies that took too great a percentage of overall earnings, plus burdensome and unnecessary regulations reduced economic growth and kept us from creating new jobs for newcomers entering the job market,” the president said.
“Our economic recovery program” Reagan said, “marks a decided turnaround from government tax-and-spend policies of the past four decades—deliberately so.”
If there’s a message from 1982 that’s relevant to our present situation, that’s the one.
Full article: http://reason.com/ar … rting-reagans-record