Ronald Reagan: King of the Socialists

[Doug]

In 1981, Reagan signed a law that sharply reduced the income tax for the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The president asserted his program would create jobs, purge inflation and, get this, trim the budget deficit. However, following the tax cut, the deficit soared from 2.5 percent of GDP to over 6 percent, alarming financial markets, sending interest rates sky high, and culminating in the worst recession since the 1930's.

Soon the president realized he needed new revenues to trim the deficit, bring down interest rates and improve his chances for reelection. He would not rescind the income tax cut, but other taxes were acceptable. In 1982, taxes were raised on gasoline and cigarettes, but the deficit hardly budged. In 1983, the president signed the biggest tax rise on payrolls, promising to create a surplus in the Social Security system, while knowing all along that the new revenue would be used to finance the deficit.

The retirement system was looted from the first day the Social Security surplus came into being, because the legislation itself gave the president a free hand to spend the surplus in any way he liked. Thus began a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class, especially the self-employed small businessman, to the wealthy. The self-employment tax jumped as much as 66 percent.

In 1986, Reagan slashed the top tax rate further. His redistributionist obsession led to a perversity in the law. The wealthiest faced a 28 percent tax rate, while those with lower incomes faced a 33 percent rate; in addition, the bottom rate climbed from 11 percent to 15 percent. For the first time in history, the top rate fell and the bottom rate rose simultaneously. Even unemployment compensation was not spared. The jobless had to pay income tax on their benefits. A year later, the man who would not spare unemployment compensation from taxation called for a cut in the capital gains tax. Thus, Reagan was a staunch socialist, totally committed to his cause of wealth redistribution towards the affluent.

How much wealth transfer has occurred through Reagan's policies? At least $3 trillion.

The Social Security hike generated over $2 trillion in surplus between 1984 and 2007, and if it had been properly invested, say, in AAA corporate bonds it could have earned another trillion by now. At present, the fund is empty, because it has been used up to finance the federal deficits resulting from frequent cuts in income tax rates. If this is not redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, what else is?

Thus, Reagan was the first Republican socialist - and a great one, because his wealth transfer occurred on a massive scale.

...Reagan's measures were similar to those that the Republicans adopted during the 1920's, which were followed by the catastrophic Depression. More recently, such policies were mimicked by President George W. Bush and they are about to plunge the world into a depression as well.

See the rest here.
The article is by Dr. Ravi Batra, a professor of economics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

[Dardedar]

DAR
I wonder how many ditto-heads know this information? Did Rush forget to spend a little time on it?

D.
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"Even in marriage I had a little guilty feeling about sex, as if the whole thing was tinged with evil."
--Ronald Reagan in a 1951 letter to a friend

[Doug]

"Even in marriage I had a little guilty feeling about sex, as if the whole thing was tinged with evil."
--Ronald Reagan in a 1951 letter to a friend

DOUG
Maybe Limbaugh feels the same way about sex. His most recent wife divorced him because he never consummated the marriage. Maybe Limbaugh feels too guilty.

Or maybe, as one of his former gay lovers said, Limbaugh is just too gay to make a sham marriage look convincing...

Limbaugh is gay?

[Dardedar]

DAR
Limbaugh is gay? Hey, let the record show that I predicted this almost ten years ago. He was going on one day about receiving a massage from a guy and it was just too too much.

Anyway, he'll make a great spokesman for the community.

This may cause maximal squirminess for the ditto-heads. But they will swallow it all, in the end, they always have before.

D.
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From: The… 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005

43. Rush Limbaugh

Charges: Rather than engage in the admittedly difficult task of justifying GOP policies rationally, the key to Limbaugh’s success is attracting an audience that actually yearns to be lied to. It doesn’t matter how many righteous fact-checkers assail him in print and on the web, because dittoheads don’t care that he’s lying, as long as the lies justify their prejudices. Limbaugh’s program is not just hypocritical; it is a celebration of hypocrisy for ignorant crackers, angry at smart people and strung out on the dwindling sensation that they are better than everyone else by virtue of their race, sex, nationality or level of bluster, because their character and accomplishments don’t warrant such feelings. If political discussion were sex, the Limbaugh audience would be a horde of virgins beating off to deranged rape fantasies."

http://www.buffalobeast.com/91/50.htm

[L.Wood]

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Even the faithful billionaires doubt Ray-Gun now. This a quote from the WSJ, April 8, '09 Little Rock's Warren Stevens, weighs in on Ray-Gun:

Mr. Stephens describes himself as a "glass half-full kind of guy" who's been forced to become a situational pessimist. A child of the Reagan era who once thought "lower taxes and deregulation were the norm," he now suspects Reagan is "the aberration."

My oh my. That's quite the fall from grace for Ray-Gun from Hero to "ABERRATION."

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