Don’t forget the war on drugs
Congress approved the budgets that created all of that debt. Congress was controlled by the democrats the entirety of his time in office. Congress approves of all tax legislation. It’s almost as if the democrats aren’t any less inclined to support the wealthy.
Congress dropped the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 28% and gained more tax revenue when it was set to 70%. This is because the brackets at that high of a level heavily incentivized rich people to engage in tax evasion or tax avoidance schemes. Removing this high tax rate made the government more money because fewer people cheated on their taxes. This has only worked once and there’s no reason to believe further reductions to the top rate would create similar revenue increases.
The missiles sold to Iran were non-functional. The bigger problem was either using the profits from the sale to fund the Contras as we were destabilizing a foreign power for the crime of wanting less capitalism.
What Reagan’s real crime was setting Americans against their own government. He was able to push through the destruction of a huge portion of the safety net we had for people under the guise of cleaning up corruption.
This macro is a mess.
Congress dropped the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 28% and gained more tax revenue when it was set to 70%.
anyone have a source for this claim of increased revenue? if so, was it just a temporary effect with longer term structural implications? besides, wouldn’t the solution to evasion have been increased enforcement? taxes aren’t just about revenue, they’re a redistributive force in the economy and arguably their main purpose isn’t to fund the government but to prevent the obscene accumulation of wealth and reduce inequality.
your argument falls flat upon historical analysis. if high tax rates were bad, and lowering them ‘fixed it’ then explain all the massive social benefits from 1940-1980:
Taxing the ultra rich is how America funded higher education, built the highway system, funded social welfare, uplifted 2 generations, built a global manufacturing and technology economy, and created a prosperous middle class. this all happened before Reagan and coincide with top marginal rates between 50-95 percent.
inequality has skyrocketed since Reagan and the policies which dismantled new dealism. I hate the Democrats who helped facilitate the rise in inequality and the gutting of social welfare programs (Clinton especially) but to claim that reducing the top marginal rates was an unequivocal good thing is a pretty extreme narrowly focused claim. those who say so based on a loosely held ‘I’ve done the math’ argument are merely using a rhetorical gotchya - it’s not a sufficient socioeconomic historically supportable argument. if it was, show me all the benefits that increased tax revenue provided from 1990-present. I’ll wait.
low tax rates are precisely how we got to people like Trump, Musk, Buffet, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel and the incredible rise in number of hundred millionaires and billionaires who are now destroying our social safety nets even more so they can flatter their egos and act out middle aged divorced guy power fantasies.
inequality is why people can’t afford things and is presently the single biggest problem of our society. taxes do make a difference in combatting that. Regean had a role in creating this system, whether you like it or not.
the power to tax is the power to destroy. we build prosperity by keeping oligarchs in check.
anyone have a source for this claim?
This was the 1983 tax cut. The longer term implication was people realized Laffer’s suggestion that there is a top rate that is so high it promotes evasion, avoidance and fraud was demonstrated to be likely true. A negative outcome was the GOP claiming further cuts would do the same when there’s no reason to believe it would.
taxes aren’t just about revenue, they’re a redistributive force in the economy and arguably their main purpose isn’t to fund the government but to prevent the obscene accumulation of wealth and reduce inequality.
Presuming this is a serious statement, why do you think this is the case instead of them funding the government which is what taxes have always been about? We didn’t care much about wealth inequality until the last 200-300 years. The ruling class has always cared about taxes.
if high tax rates were bad, and lowering them ‘fixed it’
It didn’t “fix” anything. The higher rates led to lower tax revenues. The cuts provided more.
then explain all the massive social benefits from 1940-1980:
1946-1980 as 1940-45 are war years and aren’t as great.
The US made up roughly 40-55% if the total GDP of earth in that time. As WWII destroyed the industrial capacity if most nations the USA and to a lesser extent the Warsaw Pact nations were the only ones manufacturing heavy equipment. By 1980 most of the world has either developed for the first time their own industry or revoltp what they had. This massive gap between the US population and everyone else is why things were so good.
inequality has skyrocketed since Reagan and the policies which dismantled new dealism. I hate the Democrats who helped facilitate the rise in inequality and the gutting of social welfare programs (Clinton especially) but to claim that reducing the top marginal rates was an unequivocal good thing is a pretty extreme narrowly focused claim.
There’s no “good/bad” in economics because it’s social science not a religion or moral code. I said it brought in more tax revenue which is accurate.
Inequality has skyrocketed because of anti-union sentiments and the fact that between 1991 and 2003 1/3 of the total labor pool of earth could suddenly be hired by Westetn companies (the fall of the USSR, liberalizations within China and India moving away from socialist economic policies drove this).
those who say so based on a loosely held ‘I’ve done the math’ argument are merely using a rhetorical gotchya - it’s not a sufficient socioeconomic historically supportable argument. if it was, show me all the benefits that increased tax revenue provided from 1990-present. I’ll wait.
No one is saying this. Your grasp on this history is flawed. You even have gone so far as to suggest taxes aren’t primarily about funding the government which is frankly “novel”. I wouldn’t be taking any kind of authoritative tone on this subject if I were you.
I have to work but I’ll tackle the second half later.
So the solution to people committing massive tax fraud is to lower taxes? Not to throw them in jail? 🙄
Tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance are not the same thing.
Cutting the higher marginal tax rates caused more people to move money from less stable economies with looser banking regulations to US banks which resulted in increased tax revenue taken in.
Blah blah blah. Your solution is to let criminals keep ripping us off instead of doing something about it.
As I said last time “Tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance are not the same thing.”.
No one proved anyone broke the law so there were no “criminals” to pursue. I was nine when this happened so I didnt make any decisions here.
thank him for no-brakes neoliberalism. i wish this piece of shit had only ruined his own shitty country but instead we were forced into his insane bullshit too.
Trump is just the Result of Reagan’s transformation of American politics and culture to greed first and only.
Trump is a vulture picking this nation’s corpse clean. Ronald Reagan and Jack Welch killed us half a century ago.
Absolutely
Libs showing their fascist imperialism even when trying to distance from themselves from their right-wing allies. Crying about iran while supporting genocide. How much did reagan send to the zio regime?
History has a liberal bias if you care to read instead of listen to TV all day.
If they’re saying “lib” and not “liberal”, then it’s sure not from American TV.
And you’re paraphrasing a television character.
Am American, and “lib” is used every day by MAGA on social media. Just go to X and scroll for a whole couple seconds to see overwhelming proof it’s a MAGA culture war talking point.
I’m not against shitting on liberals either, but there’s clearly a much bigger world wide problem of private equity Fascism that needs solved, and liberals have already been fighting that enemy (albeit not winning that fight). This makes them your friend whether you like it or not.
But solidarity isn’t going to happen if you’re too busy complaining about liberal bullshit to fight with them when needed instead.
Nazis are now in the White House and a Fox News host commands the biggest army in the world.
And that wasn’t even the first 90 days of this dumpster fire.
So I’d rather spend the little time we have left before polical arrests happen to work together than spend time bitching about the history of our possible allies.
I voted for Biden, and was deeply critical of his team. But without question he would be a better President now than Trump is.
Imo words critical of liberals in the US are wasted. Trump will be far more critical of them in the long run, so I’d rather spend my time making allies instead of grandstanding while they’re being publicly admonished.
The next step is them getting arrested, so the time for making allies isn’t long.
Am American, and “lib” is used every day by MAGA on social media. Just go to X
That’s not on TV then, and no I will not go on X. Here on Lemmy, “lib” is used overwhelmingly by leftists. This person complaining about imperialism and right-wing allies is not regurgitating MAGA culture.
Making allies is a great idea. We’re not going to make allies by accusing them of watching TV (like Stephen Colbert) all day.
And don’t forget ending the fairness doctrine, one of the contributions to the polarization of US politics.
In (very) broad strokes, the US basic current modern collapse timeline is like: Nixon --> Regan --> Fairness Doctrine --> Glass-Steagall --> Patriot Act --> bank bailout --> tea party to maga --> current fubar lyfe
goddamn fucking reagan
I was going to post something similar but yeah. Almost every Behind the Bastards episode that touches these topics, there is a straight line from Nixon to Trump.
The TL;DR: Republicans hated how people generally agreed with the facts surrounding Nixon and decided to do something about it. Instead of reporting conservative-slanted opinions, they instead wanted to get rid of facts all together.
Need to squeeze Citizens United in there
You don’t have citizens united in there, which I would argue is one of the largest modern causes of our current situation. Had citizens united not been vomited into the world, we might have been in a slightly better place without a decade and a half of practically unrestricted corporate propaganda shoved down our throats. I’d bet that trump wouldn’t have won in 2016 if it wasn’t for the unlimited funding he got (along with billions in free advertising from the “news” media).
The 13th amendment created the legal groundwork for transforming a free people into a nation of de facto chattel slaves. Reagan accelerated this process massively.
Mental patients 🖐️ (눈‸눈)
“Prisoners with jobs” 👈 (♡ω♡ )
The 13th amendment, which bans slavery, made people less free? We had more slavery before the 13th amendment. What we have now is fewer slaves that most don’t think of as slaves but are still slaves we just call it prison work programs.
Go read it again; the word “except” is doing the heavy lifting here.
"The 13th amendment created the legal groundwork for transforming a free people into a nation of de facto chattel slaves. Reagan accelerated this process massively.
Mental patients 🖐️ (눈‸눈)
“Prisoners with jobs” 👈 (♡ω♡ )"
Where do you see the word “except”? If you intended to write it you did not.
The 13th amendment banned chattel slavery, but turbocharged penal slavery.
Deregulation in general and of the for profit prison industry in particular has made it so that there’s more slaves in the US now than there ever was before the 13th was passed.
Granted, penal slavery is of course nowhere near as bad as chattel slavery was, but it’s still slavery, which is morally repugnant barbary and outlawed in every civilized legal system i the world.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” - CIA Director William J. Casey to President Ronald Reagan, in 1981
I will never know what it is like to be in pre-Reagan America and for that alone that man should burn in hell waiting for heaven to trickle down.
Not to glorify mental institutions, which are often vehicles of state oppression and state violence.
Having both been homeless and in a psych ward, I preferred being homeless (granted I could sleep in public transit).
On one hand, it does make sense to lower taxes if taxes are notably harming the economy or harming economic recovery, and under Reagan we DID have a long economic boom. Dropping taxes on the rich by 40% was likely unnecessary, as even ~20% would have been enough for a stable recovery.
The flip side to that is that it installed in Republicans the idea that taxes go down == economy go up, which is nowhere near the truth (as shown by the Kansas Experiment ) and is one of (IMO) the three major shifts in the GOP that has turned them into the absolute shitters they are today. The others FWIW are Gingrich’s Contract with America, or more particularly the idea he presented to the GOP that they can never let the DNC have a win even if it would benefit the GOP, and the Southern Strategy.
Trickle down economics, contract with America, and the southern strategy. The new unholy trinity.
He really didn’t though, it was fake and funded through over a trillion dollars in national debt …
I’m pretty sure he’s the president that also started using money ear marked for social security for the general fund. SS is fully funded through Miss 2030, the Republicans want to get rid of it to hide the fact they stole the money for other shit …
It took many years before people found effective antivirals to help people infected with AIDS. No nation had effective treatment.
A lot of younger people simply don’t know that the age we all consider the golden age of middle class America (40s-70s) was so because we TAXED THE FUCK OUT OF THE WEALTHY. As we should.
If we do not return to doing so, our quality of life is going to continue to decline indefinitely.
TAX. THE. FUCKING. RICH.
DON’T VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT DOESN’T RUN ON TAXING THE RICH.
Conversely, I think most of the county would rabidly support anyone who ran on that platform… Even most Trump voters
Not even the Democrats could do this with a Democrat controlled Congress and presidency
The democrats are cowards, the republicans are evil. If there ever is another proper election in the US, vote independent.
it worked for mexico almost 10 years ago.
that is, until we regime change them… again.
They wouldn’t want to do that because it would not serve their self-interests.
Do you honestly expect the fox to prevent itself from guarding the henhouse?
yet, americans think that they’re a valid alternative to the rebublican wolves nonetheless
American politics are two billionaire children in a trenchcoat trying to emotionally appeal to two groups by claiming one group is oppressing the other group into poverty through two millionaire children in a trenchcoat making claims that they keep saying through a bullhorn funded by billionaires, until you either burn somebody’s Tesla or hate that a Black person can get into Harvard with lower test scores than an Asian.
We deserve the fall of Rome and anyone who disagrees is problematic to a fucntional society.
deserved or not, it’s coming and can only be delayed by another welfare state like fdr did during the depression
couldwantmany of them are dinos, shills for the gop anyways, wouldnt have gotten anything done anyways.
i think there are shills in both direction and the leftist shills, bernie and aoc, are shilling… again… for the democratic party even though neither will be the next nominee
Did anyone else know that they recently made a film about this fucking filth?
They were obviously trying way too hard to control the narrative of this fucking piece of shit, but to also spark some kind of patriotism in all those old fucks who fell for reagan’s bullshit lies, and now trump’s bullshit lies.
I almost wanted to go and rip their little signs they had for this movie straight out of the ground. Ugh. Disgusting.
Dennis Quaid is a piece of shit.
Jack Quiad is a fun actor at least. I enjoy his work.
Looking at the IMDb listing, is this shedding Reagan in a good light?
Or is it a documentary on how he completely fucked up?
“National debt” obscures the practical consequence. National debt is just money that has been added into the economy but not taxed back out.
It’s not necessarily bad to ramp up spending, if that new money has somewhere healthy to go. (Mega projects like Medicare For All or the Green New Deal would be prime candidates.)
So where did it go?
Well, take a look at Reagan’s reign from 81-89…
There’s the problem.
precisely. the distribution of wealth is a more important indicator of economic health than simply looking at the national debt or total tax revenues. imo we need to increase taxes on the ultra rich, not because we need to reduce the deficit but because taxes prevent the obscene accumulation of wealth (and the resulting regulatory capture epitomized by modern American oligarchy).
I think we need an entirely different economic model, where there are hard limits on income, wealth, and assets. I don’t mind people being wealthy, but that definition should be something like: “I am a CEO, I get paid twice as much as a waitress. I own a very nice house, a small yacht, and spend time riding horses at the country club. My husband works as a mechanic, and only makes $10,000 less a year than me.”
It would require a huge rethink on economy, the nature of wealth, implementing a strong UBI, and replacing the dollar with a fresh currency. Still, I think a complete replacement of how things were done would be key for America to become a nation worthy of the people who live in it.
…and this chart stops at 2012
