Please stick to the comments I made in my post. At no time did I state that we should continue deficit spending. Instead I stated we needed to cut spending to balance the books, and begin to pay off debt.
Reagan pushed through the tax cuts. They doubled the federal tax receipts. Please don’t tell me this was a net loss. It wasn’t and you should know it.
The president cannot control everything Congress does. Spending did skyrocket. He wasn’t introducing large new public mandate spending programs.
Reagan signed budgets with tax cuts, and some tax increases with a big growth in spending and yes it resulted in a net loss called a deficit. It cannot be proved what those tax cuts produced on their own because they were not implemented on their own.
Yes, I have heard it all before, Reagan cut taxes, democrats increased spending (he signed), all good came from the tax cuts, all bad from the spending. Rush has a whole chapter saying that in his first book. That is a neat trick to draw that imaginary line. Most people wont buy that line.
If the government cuts your taxes 1$ but hires a new government employee for 10$ but he payes $3 dollars in new taxes even without speculating about economic growth that looks like a net revenue increase of $3-$1 = $2 on the surface. But it still results in 10$+1$-3= 8$ of new deficits. But Rush includes that $2 in increased revenue paid by the government employee (which he gets from deficits) as resulting from the tax cuts, that he cant prove.
Some tax cuts can reduce the deficit, but others will increase it.
I think Reagan was our best president but he also increased FICA taxes and cut benefits to create surplus and then spent that leaving IOUS that are being cashed in now(by borrowing) . And he started taxing SS benefits so he could spend them as general revenue too, but that increased tax revenue, Clinton expanded this. You cant add all these things together and then just say all increases in income tax revenues were due to any one thing, just because Reagan really didnt want to do those other things.