Great amusement
Dear Editor:
Great amusement
Dear Editor:
I read the response by Mr. Anthony Albini to Tom Danehy in the July 11 Tucson Weekly with great amusement. It was so full of conservative mythology and downright error that I felt obligated to respond. To keep it as short as possible:
1. The Reagan tax cuts were not a “compromise with Tip O’Neill.” Reagan cut a backdoor deal with the Boll Weevil Democrats, a regressive group of Southern Democrats, one of whom became chairman of the John Birch Society. The theory behind was rightly called “voodoo economics” by G.H.W. Bush.
2. The Reagan tax cuts were so successful that he had to rescind much of them while still in office. Too late. By the time Reagan left office, the national debt was three times larger than when he started.
3. That wartime spending that supposedly fueled LBJ’s economy? Reagan’s military spending (in real dollars) dwarfed the highest expenditures in the Vietnam War, which, ironically, came while Nixon was in office. The Reagan budget was a wartime budget, without an actual war.
4. So Clinton did not benefit at all from the “Reagan Revolution,” since the economy was in recession at the time, and Reagan’s tax cuts were mostly gone. The budget deficit still remained. With great effort, Clinton managed to get through middle-class tax cuts combined with fiscal restraint that ended up with Clinton being the last president to have a budget surplus on record, and the longest period of economic growth in American history — until Barack Obama. Clinton’s big mistake was to agree to the effective repeal of Glass-Steagal, which prohibited commercial banks from engaging in speculative investments, which led to...
5. Then along came Bush Inferior, who pushed through tax cuts that completely demolished the budget surplus. He then compounded LBJ’s mistake by waging not one, but two wars simultaneously without asking the public to patriotically support them with tax increases, as we did in WWII. What did Dick Cheney say? Oh yeah – “Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don't matter.” Then came the banking crash caused by bad mortgage bonds, bank bailouts, and the worst recession in decades.
6. Then came Obama, who was stuck with Bush’s mess, yet oversaw the longest period of growth economic activity in U.S. history, surpassing Clinton, granted that he started from a lower bar.
7. I won’t say much about Trump, except that his tax cuts massively drove up the budget deficit and probably had little impact on an economy that was already growing. Then clownishly handled the COVID-19 pandemic. What do you expect when you put a criminal fraud in office? Al Capone could have done no worse.
8. Steve Forbes is definitely not an economist. He is a magazine publisher with a degree in history. He just promotes himself as expert because he became wealthy selling business magazines. Who knows how much he earned every time he ranked Donald Trump as one of America’s wealthiest?
I have lived through all of this crap. Mr. Albini should do more research through honest sources next time.
Sincerely,
Donald Garnett
