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Reagan and the GOP's Anti-Government Master Plan [1]
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Date: 2022-12-22
Former President Ronald Reagan talks about his tax plan.
It’s been more than four decades since Ronald Reagan rode into Washington on a message that attacked the very government he was about to lead as president.
The former movie actor and California governor told anyone who would listen that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
It was a good shtick, and it’s been the foundation of the Republicans “small government” lie ever since.
I was reminded of that recently when I saw a letter to the editor to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoting Reagan’s distain for government and noting the recent U.S. Department of Energy announcement of an exciting new development in nuclear fusion energy called net energy gain, a technology that’s seen as a possible clean energy tool to combat climate change.
Net energy gain is where you fuse two hydrogen atoms together and get more energy back than was put in to create the reaction. Up to now, that process has always taken more energy to do the reaction than they get back.
A story in the Washington Post said it’s been called “the elusive holy grail of fusion research.”
To be clear, this doesn’t mean this technique will be exploding throughout the country anytime soon. This has been accomplished only at the micro level so far. There’s much more work to do and more things to figure out.
Okay, that’s about all the science I can handle.
You can read the Post’s story here.
Back to the letter, the writer notes that the very government Reagan criticized was the entity that was able to come up with this historic discovery. That got me thinking about the GOP’s long-time calls for “smaller government,” “limited government,” and whatever else they label it.
It sounds good, until you realize it’s all a con. Republicans – who have increased our national debt with as much if not more gusto as the Democrats – don’t care about the size of government. They see a “smaller government” as one that does less, costs less, and requires less taxes to pay for.
That’s the goal: tax cuts, particularly ones that will favor their big individual and corporate donors. They know their cut of their benefactors’ resulting gains will more often than not be funneled through super PACs and dark-money groups to help them win elections. And who knows where else it will go.
That’s the “small government” lie.
And where will the cuts be made to reach this goal? I don’t recall anyone interviewing a Republican talking about “small government” asking the follow-ups “What does this look like? What would you cut? What would you eliminate?”
We all know what they’d eliminate if they had the chance: programs that help people. Cuts to the social safety net. Cuts to or the privatization of Medicare and Social Security. Programs that Republicans generally hate because they cost a lot of money and help people they generally don’t like and who aren’t sending them big campaign contributions.
By the way, what resulted from Reagan’s calls for a “smaller government?” Well, in 2014 Mother Jones reported that “Reagan actually expanded the federal government.”
Under Reagan, the national debt almost tripled – from $907 billion in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988, and the federal workforce increased by about 324,000 to almost 5.3 million people, the article reported.
You can read the Mother Jones story here.
So, we ballooned our debt and hired hundreds of thousands more people while the man who championed “small government” was going about doing what he really wanted to do: cut taxes.
And that didn’t work out, either.
A Bloomberg opinion piece by Justin Fox published in 2017 was titled, “The Mostly Forgotten Tax Increases of 1982-1993.” It carried the subhead “Something had to make up for the financial hole created by Reagan’s famous cuts.”
The column began like this:
“The Economic Recovery Act of 1981, also known as the Reagan tax cuts, was the biggest reduction in U.S. taxes of the past 70 years, possibly even the biggest ever. That much is reasonably well-known.
“What is less well-known is that these cuts were then followed by a series of tax increases that, if you add them all together, were almost as big as or even bigger than the 1981 cuts, depending on the measure you use.”
You can read Fox’s column here.
Reagan’s “small government” bullshit was a lie. A con on behalf of himself and his rich friends. That con continues today by the Right.
Look, this isn’t a glorification of how government operates. It needs to better, smarter, and more efficient. Its biggest problem might be that its ultimate boss is a dysfunctional Congress full of men and women whose main agenda is helping themselves, their donors, and their friends instead of helping the people who elected them to office.
Plus, some of them are just plain dumb.
That’s something we can’t afford to be. “Small government” is just another GOP weapon in tis pro-rich, anti-poor-and-middle-class agenda. It’s just another cliché that needs to be dissected by a press that too often seems to rely on scripted questions instead of actually listening to an answer and thinking up immediate follow-ups.
In the absence of that, we’ll have to do the heavy lifting ourselves.
Are we up to it? We’d better be.
***
Thank you for reading my post. You can see my other writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody.
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