I think you misunderstand ‘supply side economics’. The claim is that by lowering tax rates, you increase tax revenues. No one ever claimed that you could increase revenue by lowering the aggregate amount of money collected in taxes - that’s a fundamental contradiction. The supply-side argument is that if you lower rates, you give people more incentive to work harder and invest more. This in turn will increase economic output, which means that even though they are paying lower marginal rates, they’ll eventually pay more in tax, simply because they are now making more money.
It seems to me that the data you presented actually corroborates this. Reagan lowered marginal rates from 70% to 28%, and by the end of his eight years overall tax receipts were up, and the percentage of overall taxes paid by the wealthy was up.
My grade school still did “duck and cover” drills until I was in 5th grade. I think what worried us most when we reached middle and high school – the desks were then made of metal.
Like a metal desk is supposed to save you in a nuclear blast? HA! Even Bert the Turtle knows you need good solid wood desk for that.
We’ve gone this whole thread, and I haven’t seen much discussion about, I dunno, f*ing social security without lube, or piling up the dead corpses from AIDS and setting them ablaze, or illegal wars across half the world, or making fun of the starving, or fighting against unions…
I think most people (and many are here) realize the USSR was on it’s way out anyway. I think any method the US decided to take would have led to their collapse.
If Ronnie had pushed the USSR to up their Jelly Bean production THAT would have toppled them as well.
Detente was Nixon’s baby. Nixon, that big liberal pinko. :rolleyes:
I think the whole idea of “The Russians are just like us” was an attempt to point out that the Russian people were not monsters, but human beings just like us, and they were NOT evil. Yeah, the Soviet heads were a bunch of assholes (with some exceptions.) But the Russians weren’t the boogyman. They were JUST as afraid of us as we were of them.
And there’s nothing wrong with Russian culture.
In other words, it was to stop xenophobia and jingoism.
Actually, one of the working theories is that the USSR was on its way to collapse in the '70s, and through continued detente and cooperation, we could have eased them into democracy, but Reagan’s administration wiped that off the table and replaced it with military escalation.
**Reagan and his foremost disciple George W. Bush have created a plutocracy where the United States is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but is ruled by the wealthiest individuals and corporate America. Williams urges Americans to move from political apathy and draw aside the power curtain to see the politicians and the corporations lurking there—and to see the dangers they represent to the American way of life. **
No, I’m afraid the situation is simply much more complex than this. The lowering of the rates certainly helped increase revenue, but it is also disengenuous to say that the expansion of the the tax base was not a tax increase. If I complain when jshore calls it simply a tax increase, I have to at least mention some objection when you ignore it and imply that the legislation in question was only a tax decrease.
I’m not sure what you are refering to here (it is very difficult to tell through your snipes). But my understanding was that Reagan increased the payroll taxes which pay for Social Security. The system is at a surplus now and for the last decade or more because of what he did. Were you reffering to something else?
Oops. I should have worded that differently. I should have said “because of what happened under his administration”, instead of “what he did”. I did not mean to suggest that he alone raised payroll taxes.
<jshore feel free to insert your obligatory remark about how these increases fooled conservatives into thinking revenue increases were due to supply side economics. ;)>
And there were some on the right who wanted to stop talking and just start shooting, to strike first and fast, to hit them has hard as possible, no matter the consequences, and hold onto our hats. Are we really going to judge the left/right divide by holding up for consideration the least representative segments?
Can you cite this for me? I remember many claims that Reagan was trigger happy, but I never once remember him ever seriously suggesting that we should start shooting. I don’t remember any serious conservative actually suggest war. I do remember many serious liberals suggest disarmament. Are you now saying that the only liberals suggesting disarmament were nuts?
You’d have a point if it was really that small a fringe. But the disarmament movement was huge. Over a million people protested in Washington against Reagan deploying the Tomahawk in Europe. The nuclear freeze movement was gigantic. Granted many of the people in the freeze movement did not want unilateral disarmament, but a big percentage wanted a unilateral freeze.
Right. And, the thing about lowering nominal tax rates is a different issue. Because the lowering of the rates was more dramatic than the actual lowering of those people’s taxes because my understanding is that when the rate was 70%, there were so many loopholes that very few people really paid anything like that…at least on any reasonable fraction of their income that nominally fell into that bracket.
That is hardly an insignificant rise over a one-year period. The revenues as a percent of GDP is not one of those numbers that fluctuates wildly.
Yes, this is true. In an attempt to put some hard numbers on this, one can ask the following question: What would the deficit as a percentage of GDP have done if the personal and corporate income tax revenues had risen at the same rate as the social security revenues rose between 1986 and 1987? This, one could argue, would give us an idea of at least roughly what would have happened in the absence of the changes in the tax code due to the 1986 act. (The fact that the rise in social security revenues is, I believe, at least roughly equal to the GDP rise in real terms + the inflation rate gives me some further confidence that this is a good baseline.) The answer is that the deficit as a percent of GDP would have dropped from 5.0% to 4.0% instead of 5.0% to 3.2%. So, in other words, the “anomalous” increase in personal and corporate income tax revenues that we are attributing to that tax act can account for a little under half of the observed decrease in the deficit as a percent of GDP.
My guess is that much of the rest of this can be accounted for by the fact that outlays actually decreased by a bit in real terms between 1986 and 1987, rather than growing at the rate that GDP grew. One factor in this is that the growth in military spending, which had gone up rapidly, slowed…It increased less than $9 billion after going up roughly $20-30 billion in the previous years of the Reagan Administration. (It would be better to report these numbers in percentage terms…but I’m too lazy to calculate this right now and, at any rate, it would only serve to make the point even more dramatic. Converting to real terms [i.e., constant dollars] might have a little effect the other way, but I doubt would change the basic qualitative story.)
This is a big “granted”. The distinction between a freeze and disarmament is huge.
Also, calling it “unilateral” seems like a misnomer based upon a post on this site:
There is some debate on this issue, as another poster claimed:
However, we would clearly need a more comprehensive assessment of the relative deployments at that time. I find it hard to believe that the U.S. did not have an effective deterrent, especially in the form of their submarine launched missiles. Also, if this really was a problem, the fact that it called for a “bilaterally negotiated halt” suggests there was room for embracing the freeze idea while still endorsing that such negotiations in some way address this SS-20 issue if it were really a problem.
The thing is, as the second poster mentioned, the ‘freeze’ movement opposed virtually all new U.S. weapons systems. Take the cruise missile - it wasn’t even necessarily a nuclear weapon, but it was protested around the world. How many times have you heard someone say, “We have enough missiles to blow up the world <insert number of the day here> times over! How many more do we need?” The logic behind that statement is a unilateral freeze. We’ve got enough weapons, so no matter what the Soviets do, we don’t have to build any more.
But of course, matching the Soviet SS-20’s in Europe was a lot more complex an issue than just saying, “We’ve got enough!” Reagan’s point was to show the Soviets that the U.S. would ALWAYS match them, missile for missile, man for man. It was part of the campaign to break the will of the Soviet Union. Whether those missiles were strictly needed in a strategic sense was an entirely separate debate. But the nuclear freeze movement wouldn’t even entertain the first argument, and their answer to the second was, “We don’t need them.”
And the absolute pro-Soviet, unilateral disarmament movement was huge. Look at international A.N.S.W.E.R today. They are Marxists. They were not peace lovers, they were cheerleaders for the Soviet Union. And groups like them were far bigger in the cold war than they are today, and they carried much more influence.
I like the general idea. But I’m not sure this gives the answer we are looking for. Wouldn’t this be biased towards salary income? That is, wouldn’t it assume that increases in capital gains (the infamous “unearned income”) and other non salary sources did not factor in? If I’m not mistaken the payroll tax revenue should be tied directly to the tax rate and the employment numbers of the time in question. Or am I thinking of this all wrong?
