Ronald Reagan

 

The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game

What's this whole world comin' to
Things just ain't the same
Any time the hunter gets captured by the game

Ronald Reagan loved a good story.  Did he get fall in love with his story and get captured by the game?

The August 6, 2021, issue of Newsweek has a cover story on Ronald Reagan.  The proposed framework of rights versus duty; exclusion vs. inclusion; and truth versus fiction, https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2021/06/truth-justice-and-american-way.html was tested on Ronald Reagan to determine its usefulness.

It is suggested that Ronald Reagan was more inclined to favor a User Optimal solution (rights) over a System Optimal solution (duty).  Remember it is not suggested that the framework is binary, either 100% rights or 100% duty, but a spectrum between those extremes,  It is suggested that in this case rights are favored over duty and not that there is no consideration of duty.

It is suggested that Ronald Reagan was more inclined to favor exclusion over inclusion.  His exclusion certainly extended to Democrats. His 11^th Commandment was to not speak ill of other Republicans.  If certain groups are more identified with Democrats, i.e. labor, government employees, blacks, he might appear to favor solutions that excluded these other groups.  He would put America first, which should not be misinterpreted as attacking those living in other countries.

It is suggested that Ronald Reagan was more inclined to favor fiction over reality.  His early specialty was rebroadcasting Chicago Cubs games where he embellished game statistics that  he received over the telegraph, in order to appear as if he were at the game in person.  He is noted for his career in Hollywood where the ability to act in fiction believable was a positive.

It is suggested that those who shared either user optimal solutions, exclusions of any kind, and favor fantasy might be inclined to think that Ronald Reagan shared their positions.  This appears to have led Ronald Reagan to support a redraft of the Tax Code which favored those users who had capital, favored states rights or any exclusions, and  fiction over reality.

The adoption of supply side, often called Reaganomics, as government policy arguably began with the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. Supply side policies proposed two things.  That expenditures by government had no value to suppliers, and that reducing tax rates for wealthy suppliers would lead to more investment by those wealthy suppliers.  This position was enacted gradually beginning in 1981 cpntinuing over several Tax Acts such as the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act of 2001 and the  Jobs and Tax Cut Act of 2017.  These Acts lowered the marginal tax rate of the highest tax bracket and reduced the income ranges of the lower tax brackets.  Adopting Ronald Reagan’s dictum of trust but always cut the cards, it is worth seeing if growth was greater after these tax cuts and benefitted all the income for all groups and not just the wealthy.

Looking at mean and median household income during the period 1953 to 2019, the reported incomes suggest that growth would have been higher if government spending had not been cut.  It also suggests that the gap in income has increased, rather than decreased over this period.

This is hardly surprising.  The Kansas experiment enacted by Governor Brownback had more drastic tax cuts, and its impact was more immediately apparent.  The changes enacted under Reaganomics were more gradual and while the end result is the same: reduced government expenditures  and increased income gaps. It has occurred over a longer period and might be  thus less obvious.  It also occurred over a period of increasing inflation, which arguably began because of the Nixon Shock, and its impacts were also marked by increasing inflation.  Raising the cooking temperatures in a pot gradually might not be noticeable by a lobster in that pot, but in the long run that lobster is cooked and dead.

Ronald Reagan might have preferred rights over duty, Republicans over Democrats, and was willing to suspend his belief, but it appears that he might have been taken advantage of by those who shared similar positions, but for different reasons.