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Let's go back to the early 1980's. 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. His accomplishment dwarfs even FDR's, and if today the small businessman suffers a crippling tax burden, he must thank Reagan the redistributionist. However, FDR took pains to help the poor, while Reagan took pains to help the wealthiest like himself.
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. Ironically, the Reagan-style socialism or wealth redistribution is about to destroy monopoly capitalism, the very system that he wanted to preserve and enrich.
Are you freaking serious? Are you serious? Seriously?
Who wrote that story, though? It's filled with conjecture and opinion.
Originally posted by David9176
Reagan also tripled our debt and increased the size of government while in office.
It was all part of the plan though.
Jude Wanninski, Republicans, and the Two Santa Claus Theory
This is why many people say that both parties are the same...but they are not....not even close....they just don't understand why.
This explains it.edit on 11-4-2012 by David9176 because: (no reason given)
LONDON — He called her “the best man in England.” She once said he was “the second most important man in my life.”
Ronald Reagan was president for eight of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 11 years in office. She was the first foreign leader to visit him after his inauguration in 1981, and their strong rapport helped transform the world.
What the Tory government under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major (and Blair since) did to the public sector has been followed by all capitalist governments throughout the world. Governments have abandoned the post-war consensus in providing welfare benefits ’from the cradle to the grave’.
Capitalist governments’ abandonment of the Keynes method of pump-priming the economies to smooth out the ’normal’ ups and downs of the economic cycle was a response to the end of the post-war economic upswing in capitalism. This meant that they could ’no longer afford’ to maintain the same level of state spending as they did before.
They declared that their number one priority was to cut back the amount of the economy taken by the state.
In the anarchist, Marxist and socialist sense, free association (also called free association of producers or, as Marx often called it, community of freely associated individuals) is a kind of relation between individuals where there is no state, social class or authority, in a society that has abolished the private property of means of production. Once private property is abolished, individuals are no longer deprived of access to means of production so they can freely associate themselves (without social constraint) to produce and reproduce their own conditions of existence and fulfill their needs and desires.