It may sound as "exaggerated" since is fashionable today to buy into all the available GOP talking points out there. The always excellent Joan Walsh sets the record straight:
"It's difficult to overstate how much Reagan-era propaganda hurt the country. It distorted our understanding of how to help low-income people, as well as our optimism they could be helped, and it corroded the social contract that had prevailed since the New Deal."
More follows below the fold...
It continues:
"Despite his reputation as a tax slasher, Reagan raised taxes three times, and tripled the deficit during his eight years in office. Sadly, his working-class "Reagan Democrat" admirers don’t seem to remember that one of his tax hikes raised payroll taxes, which hurt poor and middle-class Americans and shielded the wealthy. The main reason he's remembered as a tax-cutter is because of what he did to tax rates for the uber-rich: He slashed the top rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, and income inequality has soared ever since, so that today, the top 1 percent of Americans controls a quarter of the nation's wealth, as opposed to 8 percent when Reagan became president."
The rest is here:
http://www.salon.com/...
I strongly recomment that you all read Salon.com and their narrative about the truth concerning the Reagan years. That is here:
http://www.salon.com/...
But how about we read it from the pen of one of Reagan's helpers:
"Through the 1984 election, the old guard earnestly tried to control the deficit, rolling back about 40 percent of the original Reagan tax cuts. But when, in the following years, the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, finally crushed inflation, enabling a solid economic rebound, the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.
By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s."
The rest is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The author is David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan.
Let's go beyond the quotes although they help to understand the context of the myths sold today by the Corporate Media and by Reagan's "admirers" in the Democratic Party. You will be surprised to learn that just 4 years after Ronald Reagan left office his popularity numbers or approval of his Presidency was of about 43% of the American public.
President Carter's numbers, the public's opinion about his term registered over 60% of approval of what he had done.
Furthermore, and ironically Reagan's home town, Dixon-Illinois, is today pretty much dead thanks to Reagan's economic policies. The sad things is that many middle class Republicans who voted for Reagan never understood that "their President" only cared and worked for the wealthy and against them.
If you need a video to understand this, here we go:
We all are paying for Voodoo Economics today...
* Update: Well, thank you guys, it was late when I posted the diary and I was not expecting it to make the Rec. List!
