I don't know what it is about Ronald Reagan that makes so many people on the right and the left go all mushy. Republicans talk about the man as if he was a demigod of some sort, who should be mentioned with reference, heads bowed, hands folded. I think there's something in the Republican catechism that requires his mention during every GOP primary. Democrats rightly note that many of Reagan's policies would be considered “too liberal” by the current Republican Party, which has been teabagged into what should be oblivion, but other than that, they seem almost too afraid of offending "Reagan Democrats" to openly criticize him.
That's a shame, because there's so much to criticize.
It's time we cleared the air, and told the truth about Saint Reagan. Not only was he not a saint, he wasn't even a decent president. That he was slightly more competent than either of the two Bushes does not place him on a plane with the likes of Lincoln, Washington or FDR. But the myths about Reagan are so persistent that even now, even some lefties actually compare President Obama to him. There is no comparison to be made between Reagan and Obama. Obama is actually competent.
Let's take some time to blow up some of the greatest Reagan myths, shall we?
Ronald Reagan did NOT cut taxes, at least for most people -- Like George W. Bush, Reagan reduced taxes only on the very rich. Unlike George W. Bush, he actually raised them on the rest of us, when all was said and done. When Reagan took office, the top tax rate was 50%. When he left office, the top tax rate was 28%. That’s a 44% decrease in the tax rate, just for making a lot of money. No one else got a tax cut even close to that.
In fact, the rich saw their taxes drop, but the middle class, as usual, got screwed by Reagan. Payroll taxes went up significantly when Social Security and Medicare were overhauled beginning in 1983, and when the income tax system was “simplified” in the Tax “Reform” Act of 1986, many deductions the middle class had depended on up to that point went away in favor of the “standard deduction.”
The Congressional Budget Office ("Congressional Study: Tax Progressivity and Income Distribution," 26 March 1990. CIS#H782-11), demonstrates how effective tax rates changed for various families during the Reagan years.
|
Quintile |
1980 |
1985 |
1990 |
% Change - 1980-1990 |
|
Lowest 20% |
8.4 |
10.6 |
9.7 |
16.1 |
|
Second 20% |
15.7 |
16.1 |
16.7 |
6 |
|
Third 20% |
20 |
19.3 |
20.3 |
1.2 |
|
Fourth 20% |
23 |
21.7 |
22.5 |
-2.2 |
|
Highest 20% |
27.3 |
24 |
25.8 |
-5.5 |
|
Top 1% |
31.8 |
24.9 |
27.2 |
-14.4 |
With the Tax “Reform” Act of 1986. Everyone’s income taxes went down slightly, but it didn’t even come close to offsetting the increase in payroll taxes the non-rich had just experienced just a year or two earlier. The initial intent of this reform, which was led by Rep. Bill Bradley, a true progressive in many ways, was to overhaul the tax code and make it simpler and more fair. We got the "simpler," but the "more fair" never happened. This is the effective income (NOT payroll) tax rate, when Reagan oversaw tax “reform:”
|
To his credit, Reagan did expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helped the very poor a lot, although it left out the middle class for the most part. And let's get real here; the fact that he had to raise taxes right after he lowered them should demonstrate to folks that low tax rates do not increase tax revenues.
Which leads us to another Reagan myth:
Supply-side economics did NOT increase tax revenues under Ronald Reagan – Reagan's initial tax cuts for the rich were based on the concept of “supply-side economics,” which posits that the less tax everyone pays, the more they have to spend, and their spending will create jobs and more income opportunities for everyone else.
Unfortunately, this only works when it comes to people with little or no disposable income. The family in the chart above making $30-40,000 per year was likely to use that $467 to make a mortgage payment, or perhaps put a down payment on a car, or pay some utility bills. But the millionaire family saving $281,033 isn’t likely to “create jobs” with it. In fact, with the lower tax rates, they're less likely to invest the extra money, since much of their impetus for investment was to reduce their tax bill, and now they don't have to. Look at the numbers. This is the revenue our Treasury took in during each year of the Reagan era (The “Constant” figures are in 1987 dollars):
|
FY |
Actual |
Constant |
|
1980 |
517.1 |
728.1 |
|
1981 |
599.3 |
766.6 |
|
1982 |
617.8 |
738.2 |
|
1983 |
600.6 |
684.3 |
|
1984 |
666.6 |
730.4 |
|
1985 |
734.1 |
776.6 |
|
1986 |
769.1 |
790 |
|
1987 |
854.1 |
854.1 |
|
1988 |
909 |
877.3 |
|
1989 |
990.7 |
916.2 |
|
1990 |
1031.3 |
914.1 |
As you can see, in inflation-adjusted dollars, revenues didn’t increase significantly until Reagan RAISED TAXES on most of us in 1986.
And that leads us to another Reagan myth:
The economy did NOT boom under Ronald Reagan – There was no economic boom under Reagan. The average unemployment rate in 1980 was 7.2%. Uuemployment went as high as 11% in 1982 and the average unemployment rates for 1982 and 1983 were 9.7% and 9.6%, respectively. In fact, the unemployment rate when he was reelected in a landslide in 1984 was 7.4%, Unemployment didn’t drop below 7% until after he raised taxes for most people. The lowest unemployment rate of his presidency was 5.2% in January 1989, as he was leaving office. Not bad, but not exactly something to write home to mother about. Republicans at the time even tried to suggest that 5% constituted "full employment," which flies in the face of every economic theory out there.
Saint Reagan's job numbes are actually pathetic. He ranks as the third-worst among all post-war presidents, just ahead of both Bushes. The number of jobs grew by 2.1% per year under Reagan; about half the job growth rate under Eisenhower, just over half the rate under Johnson and Clinton, and a full percentage point BELOW Jimmy Carter.
Yes, folks, Jimmy Carter created more jobs than Saint Reagan, even though Reagan is credited with a "boom."
Saint Reagan also deserves no credit for getting a handle on inflation. Carter started that process, with Paul Volcker. Volcker was hired by Carter, not Reagan. In fact, Reagan essentially "fired" Volcker, by denying him a third term, and put Alan Greenspan in charge. Ahem.
When you talk about growth rates, Reagan’s don’t come close to Clinton's, or even Obama's. In fact, the GDP growth rate of 4.1% under Clinton in 1994, the year he lost Congress, was higher than the GDP growth rate during Ronald Reagan’s entire presidency.
Reagan wasn't even great for business. According to figures by Dun & Bradstreet, the number of failed businesses soared under Reagan; the number was actually more than FOUR TIMES anything seen while Carter was president. Check these out (the “rate” column is the number of failed per 10,000 businesses):
|
Year |
# Failures |
Rate |
|
1970 |
10,748 |
44 |
|
1975 |
11,432 |
43 |
|
1980 |
11,742 |
42 |
|
1981 |
16,794 |
61 |
|
1982 |
24,908 |
88 |
|
1983 |
31,334 |
110 |
|
1984 |
52,078 |
107 |
|
1985 |
57,078 |
115 |
|
1986 |
61,116 |
120 |
|
1987 |
61,111 |
102 |
|
1988 |
57,098 |
98 |
|
1989 |
50,361 |
65 |
|
1990 |
60,747 |
74 |
Okay, so we have historically high unemployment, moderate growth, job creation numbers that are only slightly better than both Bushes, and a record number of business failures. That's a boom?
Ronald Reagan did NOT reduce the size of government – Oh, sure, he slashed and burned just about any program designed to help the poor and working class, but his enormous increases in “Defense” spending more than offset those cuts. The fact of the matter is, the government was a about 25% larger when he left office in 1989 than it was when he took office in 1981. The civilian federal workforce actually grew from 2.8 million to 3 million during the Reagan years. And when you remove the bloated “defense” budget from the equation, that number still increased.
With all of the big talk about “limited government" on the part of Saint Reagan's admirers, the fact is, under Reagan, government spending as a percentage of GDP went from 33.8% in FY 1981, Carter’s last budget, to 34.9% in 1989, Reagan’s last. Not only that, but spending topped 35% of GDP five times. Overall, government spending under Reagan increased by 80%, despite the fact that inflation was under control by then.
Saint Reagan is responsible for the “culture of debt” mentality that engulfed Washington during his tenure – From 1946 through 1981, as Democrats and moderate Republicans ran the show, the national debt shrunk from 120% of GDP after the war, to just under 33% of GDP. During the Reagan years, that debt tripled in raw numbers, and constituted 56% of GDP by the time he left office. Keep in mind; this is while they were bragging about a “boom,” calling for “smaller government,” and claiming that tax cuts increase revenues.
Reagan was NOT a “nice guy” when he was president – This one makes me crazy, because even libs say it as if it’s a fact. Based on his record as president, he was downright mean to the poor and working classes. He slashed most government job training programs, including the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, or CETA, which had become an essential part of preparing workers for jobs by training them through infrastructure projects since it began as the "Works Progress Administration" as part of the "New Deal." Entire programs were dumped or gutted financially.
During the Reagan years, AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) payments were cut severely, meaning single mothers with several small children were forced to figure out how to keep their children healthy on less money. In constant 1987 dollars, the average AFDC payment per family dropped from $367 in 1981 to $276 in 1989. The average Food Stamp benefit per person stayed flat; it was $45 per person in 1981 and $46 in 1989. Those of you who were around then know that, even back then, no one was living well on $367 per month; to reduce that even more was just plain cruel.
And he was cutting all of these programs, even as the poverty level soared. The poverty rate was 12.7% when Reagan took office, topped 15% by 1983, and never went below 13% while Reagan was in office. , The levels of poverty seen during the Reagan years had not been seen since the 1950s, and certainly not since the War on Poverty programs had taken effect in the 1960s. By way of comparison, the poverty rate in 2009 was 14.3% in 2009, which matched the average poverty rate during the Reagan years. It rose to 15.3% in 2010, which was still well below the highest poverty rate under the Reagan regime.
The Reagan Adminstration also still stands as the only post-war administration that failed to raise the minimum wage.
His treatment of Air Traffic Controllers set the stage for a wholesale dismantling of trade unions during the 1980s than continues to this day, resulting in depressed wages for most people. In fact, Reagan (who was, ironically, a former union leader) went far beyond PATCO when it came to undermining unions in this country. His nominees to the NLRB were so bad that a House subcommittee found that they had abandoned their oversight responsibilities in what they referred to as "a betrayal of American workers." In eight years, Reagan's NLRB settled half as many complaints as Carter's had in four, and they sided with employers in three-quarters of cases. By comparison, even Nixon's NRLB only sided with employers a third of the time.
It was also during the so-called Reagan “boom” that we began to lose the middle class. Income inequality is bad now, but the trend was started under Reagan. As a “nice guy,” he could easily have adjusted his policies to stop the trend, but he chose not to. Thus, we’re left with numbers like these. Note the brakes “nice guy” Reagan put on income growth for most of the American people. The following chart demonstrates how much incomes grew during the post-war period, and how much they stopped growing once Reagan took over:
|
Quintile |
1950-1978 |
1979-1993 |
|
Lowest 20% |
138% |
-15% |
|
Second 20% |
98 |
-7 |
|
Third 20% |
106 |
-3 |
|
Fourth 20% |
111 |
5 |
|
Highest 20% |
99 |
18 |
The greatest economic expansion in US history, led by Democrats, lifted all boats, as they say. Notice that, when taxes were higher and the government was investing on infrastructue, everyone did well. With Reagan (and Bush 41) in charge, only the very rich do well. Would a "nice guy" not notice this?
In 1980, the average CEO made 30 times the amount of his lowest paid workers; by 1990, that number was up to 130 times. As a share of corporate profits, executive compensation went from just under 28% in 1980 to 61% in 1989. The wages of those making less than $50,000 – which at the time constituted 85% of the population – went up by an average of 2% per year, which was far less than the rate of inflation. At the same time, wages of millionaires shot up by 243%. Even as the poverty rate was higher than at any time since the 1950s, the number of millionaires increased from 648,000 in 1980 to 1.5 million in 1989. Families in the bottom 60% of earners saw their real (inflation adjusted) earnings drop by more than 4% between 1979 and 1990, while those in the top 10% saw their real earnings rise by about 20%. The top 5% saw a 25% increase and the top 1% saw a 45% increase.
Now, would a “nice guy” in charge of the country allow such inequities to stand, without even attempting to do anything about it? I'm a nice guy; if I saw someone drowning, I would go in to save them, or at least get them a life raft and call for help. Instead, the "Nice Guy" Saint Reagan was throwing us lead weights.
Reagan did NOT cause the collapse of the Soviet Union – If anything, Reagan brought us closer to the collapse of our own economy than anything. Before he took office, the “Defense” budget was beginning to reflect the fact that we were no longer at war. Also, there were already signs that the Soviet economy was collapsing from within. When they invaded Afghanistan, they did themselves in, financially; it simply wasn’t possible to throw as much money down that rathole as they were and continue to stay fiscally sound. In the meantime, we were throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into weapons systems that we didn’t need, and training troops for a war that was never going to happen.
Just FYI, I wrote a paper when I was in high school, at age 17, predicting the end of the Soviet Union by the end of the century, because their economy couldn't operate with as much debt as it was piling up. And I'm no genius. So, how smart was Reagan, really.
Reagan did not “support and defend the Constitution"; he undermined it – There has been a trend during the last 30 years to put government power ahead of individual liberty, and for that mindset, you can thank Ronald Reagan. Reagan didn’t give a damn about your personal freedoms, and it showed.
The “Drug War,” for example, accelerated greatly under Reagan. Yes, drugs are a problem. But a greater problem is the circumvention of individual rights in order to try to keep drugs out of the hands of bad people. Making drugs illegal, and using draconian means to find them, has created a major boom in the illegal drug trade, making criminals filthy rich and turning average people with a weakness into criminals. Reagan oversaw mandatory sentencing laws that put innocent drug users in jail, while doing little to nothing about those who actually import and sell the drugs and make billions from it.
It was under Reagan that profiling proliferated. Black men who were happily driving their luxury cars on major highways were being stopped because they were assumed to be drug dealers. Meanwhile, the clean-cut white kid in the buzz cut and the old, beat-up Honda drove by with a few hundred pounds hidden under the back seat.
It was under Reagan that police were encouraged to become corrupt. Basically, if they “suspected” someone of being a drug dealer, they got to keep whatever cash they confiscated, and it was up to the accused to go to court and demand his money back. Under Reagan, anyone who paid cash for an airline ticket, or who attempted to carry cash onto a plane, was considered guilty until proven innocent. As a result of the “drug war” that Reagan really started, we now have more people incarcerated in our prisons than anyone on earth, as a percentage of our population.
You know that I-9 form you have to fill out every time you take a job? Reagan. Yeah, thanks to Reagan, you now have to prove you’re NOT here illegally in order to get a job.
Ronald Reagan's energy policies did not keep gasoline prices low -- When Reagan took office, we had energy policies in place that were designed to reduce our personal fossil fuel use by 5% per year, even as our population increased, meaning a net decrease, and the eventual elimination of oour dependence on foreign oil. And those policies were working great. In addition, there was massive investment in alternative fuels and clean energy.
In 1982, Reagan ditched all of it. The short term effects were to drive gasoline prices to record lows for a couple of years. But the long term effects were to encourage the use of gas guzzlers and to all but abandon our research into oil replacements, even though everyone knew the Chinese and Indian markets were about to see significant growth over the coming century.
In other words, if you want to know why you're filling a 10 miles-per-gallon hog with $3 per gallon gasoline, you can thank Ronald Reagan. If we had continued down the path we were on, that hog would be getting at least 25 miles per gallon (the technology exists, folks), and it's quite possible it would be running on a combination of gasoline and biofuel, or a bio-fuel.electric hybrid. That means you could be spending 12 cents per mile to drive your hog, rather than the 30-40 cents you're paying now. Or you could be using the electric engine for short trips, at 3 cents per mile.
Ronald Reagan is at least partly responsible for why we're still using way too much OPEC oil, and why soldiers, like my son, are having to fight at the moment.
That’s enough for now. I also have enough for a follow up, like the millions who died of AIDS while he sat on his hands and pretended there wasn't a problem. But honestly, isn’t this enough to prove, once and for all, that Ronald Reagan was one of our worst president? No matter how many buildings and roadways the right wingers name after him, he’ll never be good enough.
He was a disaster as a president. Period. That he was better than Bush, Jr. only mitigates that to a small degree.
