Reagan's Gift

By Brian Morton
Baltimore City Paper
Published: February 9, 2011

Here we are, 100 years after Ronald Reagan’s birth (on Feb. 5) and 30 years after his first birthday as president of the United States, and we really haven’t given proper due to the present he gave us. True, the custom normally is for the celebrant to receive the gift, but what Reagan gave us is still giving.

I’m not speaking of hypocrisy; heaven knows there isn’t a politician elected who doesn’t give a little of that. Reagan’s hypocrisy—railing against big government while growing it, lobbying for balanced budgets while never submitting one, decrying taxes while raising them several times—is a little more pronounced than most, but that wasn’t the real gift he bequeathed us. Even his hardline statement about not negotiating with terrorists fell by the wayside when he sold arms to Iran in violation of both federal law and an arms embargo, in order to get hostages released in Lebanon.

More than anything else, what Reagan gave us is an enduring, entitled class of individuals who believe that work should be taxed, but wealth should not. These were the people who were the prime beneficiaries of Reagan’s first and most important tax cut: the one that brought down the top rate.

Historically, we had seen this before, back in the Roaring ’20s. Tax cuts that lowered the top marginal rate from 73 percent down to 25 percent fueled rampant stock speculation and real estate bubbles before it all came crashing down in the Great Depression. Sound familiar?

(More here.)