JONATHAN CHAIT DECEMBER 8, 2010
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Americans for Tax Reform has always been Ground Zero of the Ronald Reagan cult, with ATR President Grover Norquist making it a personal mission to name as many airports, schools, bridges, battleships, and anything else after Reagan as humanly possible. So it is odd to see ATR belittle the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan by noting, "It was bad enough when President Reagan got tricked into a 3-1 spending-tax ratio in 1982."
Tricked? As if he were some dopey, senile ex-actor? How has this sinister liberal myth penetrated the temple of the Reagan cult?
4 comments
Reagan campaigned for tax cuts that he claimed would self balance the budget with growth. For someone to say Reagan was tricked into collecting less revenue than he was spending is, first, an admission that it did not work, and, second, a meager effort to explain away the huge deficits resulting from Reagan's tax policies. By the way, they must have tricked Bush II too. And Saddam Hussein tricked Bush into war. Somebody other than the obvious is responsible for what happened.
- Nusholtz
December 8, 2010 at 4:45pm
Consecutive posts quoting O'Donnell and Norquist? Jonathan, you cruel, cruel man.
- Fishpeddler
December 8, 2010 at 4:59pm
Sometimes those Dawkensian memes bore into starboard minds the way that the Stuxnet worm burrowed into the computers controlling the Iranian centrifuges. And the results aren't pretty.
- liberal reformer
December 8, 2010 at 7:46pm
The weird thing is go back and watch a debate from 1980 between Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Reagan is all over the place. He says at one point that taxes are like an allowance to a child and if you raise them he will just spend the money. In almost the next breath he says that lowering tax rates allows the governemnt to collect more revenue through supply side economics. These arguments are of course in contradiction. Yet, Norquist in his quest for a "Great Leader" like North Korean semi-divine leader must explain everything away.
- MikeB.
December 8, 2010 at 9:27pm