Biggest tax increase ever

Ronald Wilson Reagan

who used to
ride a watersmooth silver stallion, Jesus
he was a handsome man

died Saturday at the age of 93. This remembrance by Lou Cannon in The Washington Post is a good summary of the man's long, remarkable life.

Despite all the star-spangled hagiography over the weekend, some of the former president's lasting accomplishments were overlooked. I want here to highlight three of Ronald Reagan's presidential innovations:

1. The helicopter press conference.

President Reagan invited the press to wave goodbye and shout questions as he boarded the presidential helicopter. As the president smiled and waved, he had an uncanny knack for only "hearing" the questions he wanted to answer. In response to friendly questions, Reagan would smile, take a few steps closer to the assembled cameras, and shout a response that was sure to lead on the evening news and appear in all the papers. If the question was unfriendly, he would frown and squint, raising one hand to his ear, and then offer an apologetic shrug -- sometimes mouthing "I can't hear you" before turning and boarding the helicopter.

This was brilliant. Every president since Reagan has borrowed this idea, but none has made it look as genuine. None of his successors has fully captured the look of genuine-seeming disappointment that crossed Reagan's face when he was "unable" to hear those questions about unemployment, the deficit, or the secret funding of terrorists on two continents.

2. The Look-Over-There War.

On October 23, 1983, 241 American Marines were killed in a bomb attack on their compound in Beirut, Lebanon. President Reagan hastily withdrew the rest of our troops from that war-torn country.

On October 25, 1983, American troops invaded the Caribbean nation of Grenada -- a cluster of islands north of Trinidad and Tobago with a total area of about 133 square miles. Grenada's military, led by a Marxist with ties to Cuba, had just taken over its government. The American invasion was quickly able to reverse that coup and Grenada was again a constitutional monarchy faithful to her majesty Queen Elizabeth.

Since Grenada was a part of the British realm, you may wonder why the coup there was Reagan's problem, rather than Margaret Thatcher's. The answer is that the British prime minister was already enjoying a surge of popularity from her own splendid little island war, so she didn't really need to invade Grenada and thus generously allowed her American friend the opportunity to do so.

Reagan's invasion of Grenada was a military and political success. His current successor, unfortunately, seems not to have grasped one of the lessons of Grenada and the essential factors of a LOT war: it should be quick, easy and relatively painless. Grenada has a population of about 89,000 -- roughly the same as that of Najaf, Iraq. The similarities between the two places end there.

3. The impression of tax cuts matters more than actual tax cuts.

President Reagan oversaw some very large cuts in the top income tax rates. He also approved the largest tax increase in American history -- hiking wage taxes by about a third.

For 7 out of 10 American households, payroll taxes represent the largest tax burden. Reagan's legacy, in terms of taxes, was to greatly increase the burden for 70 percent of Americans, while reducing the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest third of the country. President Ronald Reagan raised taxes on most Americans. By a lot.

Somehow, this simple fact was scarcely mentioned in the weekend's orgy of remembrances. Most stories, in fact, spoke of Reagan as a great tax cutter. This is, in part, due to the fact that many of those stories were written by people who belong to that upper third of Americans -- the elite few for whom Reagan actually did lower taxes. But mainly it is due to Reagan's unprecedented ability to give the impression he was lowering taxes without actually doing so. He proved that if you just say, over and over and over and over again, that you are a "tax-cutter" then people will believe you -- even as they take home less and less of their paychecks due to the largest tax increase of all time.

The same trick seems to work with saying you believe in "smaller government."

Comments

[Chris]

I remember hearing the same thing about Reagan "reducing the size of government" and scratching my head. I remember him talking a lot about that, but he really didn't do anything serious about shrinking government. Mostly he used government to enhance business, such as the looting of HUD.
However, the pundocracy had its story and no mere "facts" were going to get in its way.

[Nasi Lemak]

Thatcher did very much *not* generously allow Reagan to attack Grenada. She was spitting blood over it; particularly so since the total amount of notification the British government got of an invasion of Commonwealth land was something like an hour.

[Amanda]

Well, I remember the tax hike on the working class and the middle class. I remember my mom having to go back to work because my dad suddenly didn't make enough and even then they struggled with how all the bills would be met.

[The Navigator]

Fred, very restrained of you not to mention Reagan's policy towards Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Angola, Indonesia, South Africa, Iran, Iraq, the Phillippines, and probably dozens of others I'm forgetting.
There's been much bleating on the right about Reagan's commitment to human rights and democracy. Of course, if all you need to do to champion human rights is to wage a military campaign against nations calling themselves Communist, then the right's greatest hero should be LBJ.
If you actually have to do something about human rights, though, then perhaps we should hear a perspective on Reagan's legacy from the relatives of people killed by American-armed death squads in East Timor, Central America, etc. etc. ad nauseum.

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

How could you elide the pigeons?

[Kevin Carson]

And working people accepted that massive increase in wage taxes based on the promise that it would keep SS solvent without cuts. For twenty years, we paid those increased payroll taxes, and the so-called "surplus" was just used as an accounting gimmick to conceal the general budget deficit. Twenty years later, the "Social Security trust fund" (snicker) is full of IOU's, and Greenspan is talking about SS cuts as the only solution.

So in reality, those of us who work for a living had our taxes raised to fund Ronnie's corporate welfare give-aways to his filthy fucking rich bastard friends.

[Sigivald]

Navigator: Yeah. Nicaragua. Wanna talk human rights? And yet you're against kicking out the Sandinistas?

Kevin: Hmm. You talk about the past twenty years, and yet it's all Reagan's fault. Were there no other Presidents?

Do you fault Reagan for... er... what, exactly? Not forcing Congress, somehow, to not spend more? Not using the power he doesn't have, as executive, to magically keep a "trust fund" around, and around four elections past his stepdown? Class-warfare rhetoric about his "rich bastard friends" is neither evidence nor elevated discourse.

SS was doomed from the start, and even Roosevelt knew it. That Reagan didn't stand up and (call for Congress to) end it as President is a plausible failing, but evidently not the one you're arguing for.

I guess the Gipper can't win, huh?

[The Navigator]

Sigivald,
Yeah, I wanna talk human rights - specifically, Reagan's record on human rights. I don't think you do, actually, but I'm going to respond as if you do.
Here's my tiny little problem with that record, as noted by Eric Alterman:
"Take Guatemala. That nation's official Historical Clarification Commission charged its own government with a campaign of "genocide" in murdering roughly 200,000 people, mainly Mayan Indians, during its dictatorial reign of terror. The commission's nine-volume 1999 report singled out the US role in aiding this "criminal counterinsurgency." The violence in Guatemala reached a gruesome climax in the early eighties under the dictatorship of the born-again evangelical, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt. Nine hundred thousand people were forcibly relocated and entire villages leveled. As army helicopters strafed a caravan of 40,000 unarmed refugees seeking to escape to Mexico, Reagan chose that moment to congratulate Ríos Montt for his dedication to democracy, adding that he had been getting "a bum rap" from liberals in Congress and the media. His Administration soon provided as much aid to the killers as Congress would allow."

I was against using a proxy army of murderous, drug-running thugs to try to force out the highly imperfect Sandinistas. The Sandinistas appear to have done bad things in some areas, but they abolished the death penalty (although they appear to have used extrajudicial killings to persecute some indigenous tribes.) I am confident that, overall, their human rights record compared favorably to that of the right-wing regimes that we backed in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. If we were going to be getting rid of Central American regimes, the barest decency and consistency demanded that we first get rid of the comparatively more brutal ones which were, after all, largely dependent upon our support.
Please, please, Sigivald, before you spend another byte of bandwidth debating this point, at least tell me what you did, or what actions you supported, to reduce human rights violations in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.