Taxes: What People Forget About Reagan (McCain, Congress, health care, Clinton)

[SLCPUNK]

"By today's standards, the Gipper would easily qualify for status as a back-stabbing, treacherous RINO [Republican in Name Only]," wrote Tax Analysts contributing editor Martin Sullivan, in an article for Tax Notes in May.
Thanks in part to the increases in defense spending during his administration, Reagan also didn't really reduce the size of government. Annual spending averaged 22.4% of GDP on his watch, which is above today's 40-year average of 20.7%, and above the 20.8% average under Carter.

Those who oppose higher taxes and are fed up with record levels of U.S. debt may pine for Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of lower taxes and smaller government. But it's worth considering just what Reagan did -- and didn't do -- as lawmakers grapple with many of the same issues that their 1980s counterparts faced: a deep recession, high deficits and a rip-roaring political divide over taxes.

taxes-what-people-forget-about-reagan: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/taxes/article/110597/taxes-what-people-forget-about-reagan?mod=taxes-filing - broken link)

[juppiter]

It seems to me that the only fiscally conservative president we've had in the past 30 years was Bill Clinton.

[Wapasha]

Originally Posted by juppiter

It seems to me that the only fiscally conservative president we've had in the past 30 years was Bill Clinton.

Yeah, his big push for a massive single payer federal health care was fiscally conservative.

BTW, the president can only sign what the congress gives him to sign, and the congress holds the purse strings. Reagan had full democrat control of both houses, hence their big spending. Clinton had republicans holding back the reins to government spending, and Bush was a big government spender. Even McCain, who is no fiscal conservative, referred to Bush's spending as that of a drunken sailor.

The president is always the leader of his party, and when the president and the congress are in the same political party, the president pretty much gets everything he wants. Even though the republicans did not have a big majority in the congress, Bush got the big spending that he wanted, for two reasons. One, he was the leader of his party, and two, the democrats loved big spending too,a nd helped pass his bills. 0bama is getting what he wants too, which explains over $4 trillion in debt since the dems took over congress.