We fought a war on lies, & lies won-Reagan destroyed the social compact that built postwar America

[kpete]

Friday, Feb 4, 2011 08:30 ET
Joan Walsh
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



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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.

Finally, while President Reagan is remembered as a genial optimist, Matthew Dallek and Steve Kornacki are right to remind us of the original Reagan: the proto-Nixon, who used race and fear to become California's governor in 1966. Reagan defeated California Gov. Pat Brown, running against Brown's supposed tolerance for black Watts rioters and Berkeley radicals, channeling white fears of urban violence, and riding a backlash against civil rights and the Great Society. When Reagan beat Brown he vanquished liberalism, and liberalism "never really recovered," Dallek wrote in "The Right Moment," his book about Reagan's first victory. Nixon learned from Reagan, and played on white fears that government was helping undeserving blacks; Reagan then learned from Nixon, and cut out the nasty racial rhetoric, attacking government, rather than its beneficiaries. By the time he became president, he talked less about "welfare queens," and he'd stopped railing about "young bucks" buying steaks with food stamps, or calling city streets "jungle paths after dark." But the damage had been done, and all but the super-rich are poorer for it.

the rest:
http://www.salon.com/news/the_real_reagan/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2011/02/04/reagan_war_on_poverty

[kentuck]

1. It is true..

but so unfortunate that so few people believe it.

[Gregorian]

2. He won the election through lies. He duped Dems.

My father, a liberal voter, voted for Reagan. A vote he made because Reagan sounded sincere.

[Kievan Rus]

3. And to think they're going to honor that disgrace 2 days from now at the Super Bowl

In my honest opinion, Reagan was not simply the worst President in American history, he was the worst person in American history, period.