Excellent article on Reagan -- must read!

[FourScore]

Joan Walsh
Friday, Feb 4, 2011 08:30 ET
We fought a war on lies, and lies won
Trashing the War on Poverty, Reagan destroyed the social compact that built the postwar American dream

..."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...

SNIP

...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.

If that 70 percent rate sounds a little high, it's useful to remember that the top rate was 94 percent at the end of World War II, and after a brief drop to 82 percent, it stayed in the 90s under Republican Dwight Eisenhower; it was Democrat John F. Kennedy who slashed it to 70 percent. (It's actually worth reading this whole article.) The über-rich -- the top tenth of 1 percent -- saw their share of income drop from nearly 12 percent before the Great Depression, to under 3 percent by the 1970s. Those are the tax rates that powered the postwar boom -- the expansion of public education and universities, highway construction and home-ownership, government-funded research and development -- that we think of as the American dream.

So let's be clear: Reagan began a destructive spiral of concentrating wealth in the hands of fewer people, and deregulating business, that culminated in the economic crash we're still digging out of today. He even heralded it, by signing the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institution Act, which waved the "Go" flag on the savings and loan scandal, and foreshadowed the repeal of Glass-Steagall a decade later. To review: Under Reagan, income inequality began to grow, household savings dwindled, household debt correspondingly began to rise, and the clout of the financial industry exploded. The top 0.1 percent of Americans saw their share of income climb higher than it was before the Great Depression. And here we are..."

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2011/02/04/reagan_war_on_poverty/index.html

[somone]

1. But but we all want to get rid of "excesses" of the federal government and

"return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship" :sarcasm:


No Heating Oil For You!

[FourScore]

2. I'm going to kick this. It's too good an article to let fall. n/t

[somone]

3. It is a must read

[Brewman_Jax]

4. Excellent article

and a must-read. It was Reagan that killed a lot of the social liberal gains and then made "liberal" a dirty word. He destroyed the social safety concept AND made racism fashionable in one blow with his "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" remarks. He gutted the strength of the unions. He also re-packaged the discredited concept of supply-side economics as Trickle-down Reaganomics. He raised taxes and shielded the wealthy from tax hikes while robbing the middle class.

He should have said "trickle-on" economics.

It's sad that Reagan is often considered a "great" president. :(

[Blue_Tires]

5. ttt

[DCKit]

6. Thanks. Passed on to all my favorite (R) voters. nt

[Enthusiast]

7. K&R I do love Joan Walsh.

I hope she will make the occasional appearance on Keith Olbermann's new program on Current.

[malaise]

8. K & R

Fuck Reagan