The Reagan Legacy - A Weakened America

Diarist RaulIV in DailyKos points to, and expands upon, a Joan Walsh piece and a Gene Lyons piece in Salon detailing how Reagan's beliefs in government have slowly been killing the country. All are worth reading.

Walsh writes:

Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" purported to put meat on the bones of Reagan's "Poverty won" argument, marshaling an arsenal of statistics to show that poverty programs, especially what was known as "Aid to Families With Dependent Children," encouraged promiscuity, rewarded the lazy and destroyed the family -- especially the black family.

Murray's work was contemporaneously, and later, shown to be misrepresentations, if not outright lies. But no matter; Murray's--and Reagan's--work was done. They got the country as a whole to start looking at the poor not with sympathy but contempt. They got the country to look at poor people, and particularly poor black people, as morally wrong. They set American against American.

And Reagan was no tax-cutter--at least not for the common man:

The main reason he's remembered as a tax-cutter is because of what he did to tax rates for the uber-rich: He slashed the top rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, and income inequality has soared ever since, so that today, the top 1 percent of Americans controls a quarter of the nation's wealth, as opposed to 8 percent when Reagan became president.

For the rest of us?

Sadly, his working-class "Reagan Democrat" admirers don’t seem to remember that one of his tax hikes raised payroll taxes, which hurt poor and middle-class Americans and shielded the wealthy.

One of those tax hikes, by the way, was ostensibly designed to fund Social Security because everyone knew the swell of boomer retirees was on its way:

In 1983, on the recommendation of his Spcial Security Commission— chaired by the man he later made Fed chairman, Alan Green-span—Reagan called for, and received, Social Security tax increases of $165 billion over seven years.

That's the Social Security that Republicans are now trying so hard to de-fund and destroy as allegedly causing a significant part of the budget deficit. They're trying to back out of a deal that Reagan himself got us into. So much for the Legacy.

No, Reagan didn't care at all about the great mass of Americans--if you were poor, he taught the rest of the country to dislike you, if not hate you; the rest, he taxed to spare the very, very rich. And Republicans have been following in his footsteps ever since.

And this is the President whose likeness some want carved into mount Rushmore? I didn't know we held those who weaken our country in such high esteem.