Every year Reagan presented a big spending budget that was very near what the Democrats wanted.
Every year Tip O'Neil would say that the Reagan Budget was dead on arrival. Then late in the year Reagan and O'Neil would negotiate and Reagan would "Reluctantly" agree to a Democrat budget that was only slightly larger than the Proposed Reagan budget. Then Reagan would declare victory.
But the truth is Reagan proposed budgets that would have increased spending by nearly as much as the finally adopted budgets did. The last carter budget was for 591 Billion dollars. The last Reagan budget was 1.133 Trillion dollars.
You Can claim that Reagan had to deal with a Democrat Congress... but you have to admit that Reagan was able to convince the Democrats to cut taxes, but he did not even try to convince them to reduce spending.
Reagan always introduced his proposed budgets by telling us he was only trying to reduce the rate of increase in the budget. His budget would decrease the rate of increase by 1 or 2 percent .. then he would sign on to the Democrats adding the 1 or 2 percent back. Reagan was "never" able to cut spending. He never made good use of the veto.
The truth is Reagan started his Republican Career as a RINO. Reagan in his 1980 campaign told every worker during speeches in the industrial Midwest that he was the only candidate to run for president who was a member in good standing of a labor union. He also told every group of workers he spoke to that he was the only candidate for president to ever be elected twice to the presidency of his union. He would add... "If you think I didn't negotiate good contracts for my members I invite you to ask any of the members or any of the companies with which I negotiated." "I would note that that I was reelected to the presidency of my Union"
Reagan also told every audience in Ohio, Michigan and other industrial states that his political hero was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He told conservative audiences his hero was Calvin Coolidge. But he told union workers that his political views had not changed. FDR was still his hero. He told them it was the Democratic party that had changed. That is why he got over half the union workers votes.
Reagan in 1964 had such a reputation as a RINO that when he decided to run for Governor of California both advisers Ed Meese and Cap Weinberger were afraid he could not win the Republican primary. The Republican base in California does not nominate RINOs.
They decided that one way to reduce the RINO reputation was to have Reagan speak for Barry Goldwater at the Republican convention in 1964. He did so and from that point out the media painted Reagan as a Goldwater Conservative. But he was not. After he was elected president he never had anything to do with Goldwater. He never invited him to the white house. He had Tip O'Neil the Democratic speaker of the house over nearly every week.
It is funny to note that during the 1980 campaign the reporters on the campaign trail had a pool to see who could get Reagan to say Barry Goldwater's name. The closest anyone came was Reagan one time referred to him as the Senator from Arizona.. but did not say his name.
Reagan openly ran in 1980 on both the domestic and Foreign policy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He proposed the tax cuts of JFK for curing the economy and he proposed "the defend any friend and oppose any foe in the name of freedom" spoken by JFK in his inauguration speech.
If you think Reagan was conservative then so was Roosevelt, Truman and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Reagan while in office as president governed exactly as they would have governed. Cut taxes and increase spending to fix the economy, and oppose the Soviet Union to win the cold war.
What Reagan didn't do was govern like Nixon, Ford, or Carter. He governed like the RINO he was.
Second, Bush’s lack of philosophical commitment to limited government has set the tone in Washington, where the GOP was losing its will on spending before Clinton left town. Rhetoric matters, and there the divide between Reagan and Bush becomes a yawning chasm. Bush has for the most part carefully distanced himself from the conservative anti-statism of Reagan and Goldwater. It’s hard to imagine Reagan ever saying, as Bush did in 2003, that government has got to move whenever somebody hurts. It was a recent Democratic president who was interested in feeling our pain.