Sorry, I just went back far enough to understand you point on this. I see that you are saying the drop was due to tax increases and that there were no further drops because there were not further tax increases.
:eek: No president has monuments in 3,067 counties! Not Washington, not Jefferson, not Lincoln or FDR. What are these people smoking?
And what makes them think they’re going to get a Reagen memorial in Moscow or whatever? The Russians might not despise RWR’s memory, but that doesn’t mean they care to remember him fondly . . . or at all. I doubt they could sell a Reagan monument even to Warsaw. Berlin, maybe.
Oh yeah, and Reagan did tons to help ease my fears of a full blown nuke war -what with his off the cuff remarks like “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes”
I was a teen in the 80’s and his attitude about nuclear war, stockpiling nukes and winning over the “evil empire” at any cost scared the crap out of me. Most of my friends (myself included) didn’t think we’d make it to the 1990s.
I know I’m not the only one here in my age group who feels this way.
There was plenty of scaremongering going around on the left, so I’m not surprised you were scared. But the key takeaway from that era is that you were wrong, and he was right.
About this “winning the Cold War” thingy. Was it really that great an idea?
The Soviet Union was clearly on a transitional path, or else Gorbachev could never have happened. The Soviet leadership was soberly aware that thier nuclear threat was less than compelling, if they initiated such a conflict, they would be creamed. In essence, the Cold War as a mortal struggle between competing ideologies, was over.
Does it really make sense to advocate the de-stabilization of such a regime? Chaos and insurrection is the playground of scoundrels throughout history. Russias nuclear arms, though decrepit, were still nuclear arms. They have passed from comparatively sensible Gorbachev to a drunken lout and finally to a fish-eyed KGB operative who looks as though he rises from his grave to feed on the living.
That the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union were not dire and destructive is good fortune, and I am happily content that it be so. But only a fool seeks to topple a building without knowing where it will land.
(One good word, or perhaps two: coming after Nixon, he showed that malignant cunning and corrupt intelligence is actually less dangerous in a President than a sunny, cheerful, and adamant ignorance. And I very much doubt if he would have referred to Putin as “Pooty-Poot”. At least, not till someone yelled “Cut!”)
The greatest accomplishment of Reagan was his ability to delude a fair-sized chunk of the populace that “trickle down” economics could work. It doesn’t work, of course, as any ten-year-old can plainly see, but the fact that so many conservative apologists keep embracing it as the panacea fof all ills is a testament to Reagan’s ability to sell snake-oil to the gullible.
What, precisely, was he wrong about? That Reagan was an idiot that played nuclear poker with the world as the stakes? Because it sure as hell looks that way from where I sit. And what in hell was Reagan right about?
He was right that if you pushed the Soviet Union hard enough, it would collapse. The left was too scared to make the attempt, and prefered a status-quo in which the most evil dictatorship on the planet would be allowed to continue on being evil for as long as it liked, as long as was willing to agree to certain security demands.
Actually, the more radical fringes of the left didn’t even want to maintain detente. They wanted unilateral disarmament. They wanted the U.S. to dismantle its nuclear weapons and roll back the military unilaterally. Remember?
Heh, I come from a generation in which hiding under one’s school desk was the prescribed method of escaping the effects of a nuclear weapon. Didn’t they still have school desks in your day?
But, I’m confused here. Haven’t you gone on record saying that the USSR was kickin’ ass and takin’ names in the seventies? Now, I don’t know from international relations, I’m just a dumbass liberal, but as a rule, if someone is on top of their game and roaring like a lion, then to push them hard would be pretty fucking stupid. After all, it might just lead to great swaths of the world glowing green for several centuries. And that doesn’t strike me as very smart.
And I hardly think that the USSR was the most evil dictatorship on the planet. Hell, I’ll go out on a limb and say that if you had polled people in 1979-1980 they woulda been mostly down on Iran.
Thanks for the link. As pantom’s post noted, the 1986 act was a complicated piece of legislation that did nominally decrease a few rates but also eliminated a lot of deductions and loopholes. And, the fact that personal and corporate income tax revenues jumped between 1986 and 1987 (by a much larger amount than social security revenues went up…and they apparently weren’t messed with) is proof-positive that the net effect of the changes was to increase these taxes. Surely, one cannot explain it as being due to economic expansion from this act since it is doubtful such I don’t even think a supply-side true believer would argue this could happen so quickly…and if it did it ought to show up in increased social security revenues as much as the other revenues. Besides which, I assume one of the main motivations of that act was to try to increase revenues and reduce the deficit once it was clear what a failure supply-side ideas were in doing this…And it did.
No, but it is certainly an effective tax increase if you “repeal … the two-earner deduction, income averaging, and the state and local sales tax deduction. Repeal … the 60 percent capital gains exclusion for individuals… Broaden … the corporate tax base through repeal of the investment tax credit, limiting depreciation deductions, restricting the use of net operating losses, etc.”
Look, the supply-side claims as I understand it is that you lower taxes but you eventually get more revenue because the GDP grows by more than if the taxes were higher so that you are getting a lower tax rate on a higher GDP and (if the GDP increase is greater than the tax rate decrease) you come out ahead in revenue. (That is the strong supply-side claim; some make a weaker supply-side claim that you lose revenue but significantly less than you’d expect because of the greater GDP growth.) Now, we know for a fact what the GDP growth was between 1986 and 1987 and that the increase in revenues from personal and corporate income taxes far outpaced it. (I also doubt that anyone would be willing to attribute any large fraction of that GDP growth to the 1986 Tax Reform Act, but that is besides the point for the moment.) What other interpretation can we give than that the reforms resulted in an effective increase in the rate in which people were paying taxes?!? If you can explain it in some other way, I’d be happy to listen.
If you really want me to give alternate explanations for what happened, I will. I thought you grew tired of my tendency to do that.
I was not really trying to claim that the Tax reform act of 1986 caused enough economic growth to account for the revenue changes in 1986. Although both the article you linked to and the one I linked to mention several tax changes throughout Reagan’s tenure, so perhaps some of that helped in this regard.
My only point was that if the only criteria for a tax increase is that it increases revenue, then even the supply side theory should be considered a tax increase. And even at that I was partly kidding. You’ll notice the wink smile on revue.
It seems to me that one can discuss the change in the tax rate as a tax increase or decrease. In the same way one can discuss a change in the percentage of income paid as a tax increase or decrease. Where we get into trouble is when we use the phrase tax increase in one sense and it is heard in the other. Simplifying the tax code (and thus broadening the tax base) to generate more tax revenue while at the same time reducing the tax rates can be seen as both a tax decrease (the rates were lowered) and a tax increase (some people paid more taxes specifically those who had taken advantage of the deductions).
Okay, fair enough…I am willing to admit that it was a complicated piece of legislation. However, its net effect was to increase revenues from personal and corporate income taxes for a given fixed amount of GDP. In that sense, it was a repudiation of the previous notions of supply-side economics whereby one was trying to increase revenues by decreasing the amount of taxes paid for a given amount of GDP but hoping that the GDP rise that you produced by doing this would outpace the decrease in the tax rate so that you still got more revenues.
So, the lesson that I think we learn from this is that we can give Reagan some credit for abandoning his ideological pre-conceptions and take realistic measures to reduce the deficit that actually were at least somewhat effective in doing so. Unfortunately, there is as of yet no evidence that Bush is willing to do this.
I should have noted in that last post, that it does not seem that a huge new revenue source was discovered in any of the tax sources. This cite suggests that taxes recieved from personal and corporate income taxes remained pretty close during the years in question. True, the personal income taxes did go up about .5% of GDP in 1987 and corporate taxes went up about .4% (again of GDP there was a 6% change in personal taxes and 28% change in corporate taxes recieved as measured by percentage of GDP). Also, all taxes taken together seem to have only risen from 17.5 to 18.4 percent of GDP from 1986 to 1987. If the 1986 tax bill resulted in strictly a tax increase, it seems that the percentage of GDP should have gone up more. Again, though, I am not suggesting that the 1986 tax Reform Act spured economic growth. I am certainly not giving it credit for all of whatever growth occured at the time.
All I’m saying is that measuring the reciepts and noticing that they increased does not, in and of itself, mean that the rule change was a tax increase (in either sense of the phrase as I used them last post).
I guess, that the short answer would be to say simply that the deficit reductions (you know the thing that started this whole hijack in the first place) were the result of spending restrictions (not reductions, certainly, but restrictions on growth), economic growth, and changes in the tax code. I’m simply resistant to call a change which included “A reduction in the number of individual income tax brackets to two - 15 percent and 28 percent. Increases in the zero bracket amount and personal exemptions.” simply an increase.
As usual, the picture is simply more complicated than that.
