http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
Reaganomics (a portmanteau of Reagan and economics attributed to Paul Harvey[1]) refers to the economic policies promoted by the U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. The four pillars of Reagan's economic policy were to:[2] 1. reduce government spending 2. Reduce income, and capital gains marginal tax rates, 3. Reduce government regulation, 4. Control the money supply to reduce inflation. In his stated intention to increase defense spending while lowering taxes, Reagan's approach was a departure from his immediate predecessors. Reagan enacted lower marginal tax rates in conjunction with simplified income tax codes and continued deregulation. William A. Niskanen, one of the architects of Reaganomics, summarizes the policy as "Reagan delivered on each of his four major policy objectives, although not to the extent that he and his supporters had hoped," and notes that the most substantial change was in the tax code, where the top marginal individual income tax rate fell from 70% to 28%, and there was a "major reversal in the tax treatment of business income," with effect of "reducing the tax bias among types of investment but increasing the average effective tax rate on new investment." Roger Porter, another architect of the program, acknowledges that the program was weakened by the many hands that changed the President's calculus, such as Congress.[2][3] The effect was primarily a change in the composition of tax revenue, towards payroll and new investment, and away from higher earners and capital gains on existing investments, with comparatively small effect on overall tax revenue: the changes "reduced the federal revenue share of GDP from 20.2 percent in fiscal 1981 to 19.2 percent in fiscal 1989," a 1% reduction. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
