Bandit LOAF said:
All the people who voted for him were running Enron? That's the strangest claim anyone on the entire internet has ever made.
I was making a sweeping generalization that people in charge of big business are largely from the Republican Party.
Maj.Striker said:
Um...right. I'm not sure if I have the time to think of a suitable statement exploring the sheer stupidity (not to mention falseness) of your statement. Maybe Pysch would be able to expound on this because it pretty clear you don't have a head for politics.
Point 1 The Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1996 states the number of people (white, black, and Hispanic) below the poverty level increased in almost every year between 1981 and 1992 (31.8 to 39.3 million).
Point 2 We were $994 billion in debt in 1981 fiscal year, when Carter left office, and $2,867 billion when Reagan leaves office in fiscal 1989. The rough number is 2.8 times as much in 1989 as in 1981. No, it's not
quite tripled, but very close. Okay, so the republicans have an argument for this: it didn't really double or triple when you take it as a percentage of either GDP or GNP. Okay, if we go with that, then it can indeed be agreed that Reagan didn't really double the debt as a percentage of either of these figures. But that doesn't really make Reagan look any better. As a historical look at the debt since before the United States entered World War II will show, the debt as a percentage of GDP never went up meaningfully for any extended period of time except for two periods: during the War itself, and starting during the Reagan years. At least President Roosevelt had the need to borrow money hand and fist to fight the Axis powers. What's Reagan's excuse? We needed to borrow money to give a tax break to the wealthy?
Point 3 1986 Tax Reform Act is widely considered to be the best piece of American tax legislation since the adoption of the income tax. It is the opposite of Reaganomics. Over its first five years, it closed more than $500 billion in loopholes and tax shelters. As a result:
* Major corporations that previously had paid little or nothing in income taxes due to loopholes were put back on the tax rolls, and corporate taxes were increased overall by a net of more $100 billion over five years.
*A huge wasteful tax-shelter industry for high-income individuals was shut down.
*Tax rates on capital gains income were raised to the same level as on other income.
* Millions of moderate-income working families got tax relief through a major expansion of the earned-income tax credit.
* Taxes on most families (on average, all but the best-off tenth) were reduced. (The table shows the tax changes by income group.)
* The income tax was substantially simplified for most filers.
Allied in support of the 1986 reforms were a vast array of public interest groups, labor unions and citizens groups around the country. The act was also highly praised by most economists, because it leveled the playing field for businesses and investments, and made our economy more efficient and productive. Unsuccessfully opposing the 1986 Tax Reform Act were low- and no-tax corporations, recalcitrant supply-siders and tax-shelter promoters. (Opponents included, for example, Newt Gingrich, Bill Archer and billionaire Donald Trump, who continues to criticize the act for cracking down on abusive real-estate tax shelters.)
Point 4 To avoid being misled by the business cycle, one must look at underlying economic growth rates. The following table accomplishes this result in two ways. First, it measures economic growth and other data from one business cycle peak to the next, rather than from a recession to a later peak. Second, it uses CBO calculations of "potential" economic growth — that is, CBO's (Congressional Budget Office) estimate of the size of the economy in any year if unemployment were at normal levels, rather than abnormally high or low levels. In effect, CBO directly calculates the size of the underlying economy, ignoring the business cycle. Both approaches give the same answer: economic growth rates have slowed from decade to decade; if income tax rates have made any difference to economic growth, that difference has been too small to be obvious. Specifically, the CBO data show that the underlying rate of annual economic growth was lower in the 1980s than the 1970s. It averaged 3.4 percent from 1969 to 1980, then slipped to 2.7 percent in the 1980s (not the 3.8 percent that comes from measuring from the depths of the recession in 1982), and is now projected at 2.1 percent. It is plausible that the underlying annual growth rate might have been slightly less than 2.7 percent in the 1980s were it not for the 1981 tax cut, but surely only slightly.
Point 5 In 1993 Clinton raised the taxes on the rich, the opposite of Reaganomics, opponents argued that this would stop the growing economy. That did not happen.
psych said:
Frosty (a Republican like me) thinks Lehah is cool, and I think Frosty is cool, so I'll let Lehah's statement slip by. It was way less harsh then what others have said about Reagan today.
Hey, I grew up on the guy too - and he was one hell of a public speaker for a bad actor. But he also knew how to waste money quicker than a sailor in a whore house.
overmortal said:
I realize that I'm drunk while saying this, but I'm pretty sure LeHah's an asshole.
Like my T-Shirt says: "My parents said I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up. So I became an asshole".
