Folks,
Apologies for cross-posting. Two samplings of the non-establishment view of Reagan, a man who is
currently being airbrushed and canonised ad-nauseam in the corporate media. As a politically
awakening highschool student back in Uganda/Sudan, I clearly remember Reagan's racist and disastrous
policies of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa, a corollary of which sowed death,
misery, and economic sabotage across southern, eastern, and central Africa.
vukoni
___________
The Great Taxer
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Over the course of this week we'll be hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan, much of it false. A number of news
sources have already proclaimed Mr. Reagan the most popular president of modern times. In fact, though Mr.
Reagan was very popular in 1984 and 1985, he spent the latter part of his presidency under the shadow of the
Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had a slightly higher average Gallup approval rating, and a much higher
rating during his last two years in office.
We're also sure to hear that Mr. Reagan presided over an unmatched economic boom. Again, not true: the
economy grew slightly faster under President Clinton, and, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates,
the after-tax income of a typical family, adjusted for inflation, rose more than twice as much from 1992 to
2000 as it did from 1980 to 1988.
But Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of
tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut
with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people. This
is not a criticism: the tale of those increases tells you a lot about what was right with President Reagan's
leadership, and what's wrong with the leadership of George W. Bush.
The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify
the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax
cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third
of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax
increase.
The contrast with President Bush is obvious. President Reagan, confronted with evidence that his tax cuts
were fiscally irresponsible, changed course. President Bush, confronted with similar evidence, has pushed for
even more tax cuts.
Mr. Reagan's second tax increase was also motivated by a sense of responsibility - or at least that's the
way it seemed at the time. I'm referring to the Social Security Reform Act of 1983, which followed the
recommendations of a commission led by Alan Greenspan. Its key provision was an increase in the payroll tax
that pays for Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance.
For many middle- and low-income families, this tax increase more than undid any gains from Mr. Reagan's
income tax cuts. In 1980, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, middle-income families with
children paid 8.2 percent of their income in income taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. By 1988 the income
tax share was down to 6.6 percent - but the payroll tax share was up to 11.8 percent, and the combined burden
was up, not down.
Nonetheless, there was broad bipartisan support for the payroll tax increase because it was part of a deal.
The public was told that the extra revenue would be used to build up a trust fund dedicated to the preservation
of Social Security benefits, securing the system's future. Thanks to the 1983 act, current projections show
that under current rules, Social Security is good for at least 38 more years.
But George W. Bush has made it clear that he intends to renege on the deal. His officials insist that the
trust fund is meaningless - which means that they don't feel bound to honor the implied contract that dedicated
the revenue generated by President Reagan's payroll tax increase to paying for future Social Security benefits.
Indeed, it's clear from the arithmetic that the only way to sustain President Bush's tax cuts in the long run
will be with sharp cuts in both Social Security and Medicare benefits.
I did not and do not approve of President Reagan's economic policies, which saddled the nation with
trillions of dollars in debt. And as others will surely point out, some of the foreign policy shenanigans that
took place on his watch, notably the Iran-contra scandal, foreshadowed the current debacle in Iraq (which, not
coincidentally, involves some of the same actors).
Still, on both foreign and domestic policy Mr. Reagan showed both some pragmatism and some sense of
responsibility. These are attributes sorely lacking in the man who claims to be his political successor.
_______________
The Black Slate: Remembering Reagan
By Lester Kenyatta Spence ![]()
On Saturday, June 5, Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States,
passed away. For the next several weeks I would imagine that we're going to hear a number of platitudes about
how Reagan made Americans feel good about themselves again, about how he beat back the world threat of
Communism, and about how he was the Great Communicator, able to use his acting skills to create a rapport with
Americans the likes of which we had not seen up until that time. And to be fair, these accounts have more than
a ring of truth to them. Reagan did make a number of Americans feel good and he was able to communicate a set
of powerful principles and practices to people in a way that resonated with them.
But as is normal when anyone dies, the rough edges are made smooth. And with someone of Reagan's
stature, what's left when the historical account has been paved over with good intentions is an individual with
few to no flaws. Given the way African Americans felt about and lived under Ronald Reagan, this process of
historical revisionism is problematic. His presidency was anything but sunny for us.
Take the first place Reagan first announced his candidacy for the 1980 Presidential run. He didn't announce
it in Iowa, nor in New Hampshire. He didn't even announce it in California, the place he came to prominence.
He announced it in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
The only event of historical note to ever happen in Philadelphia, Mississippi, up until that point,
was the murder of three civil rights workers (Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Cheney) in 1964.
Other candidates, including those from the Democratic side of the aisle, made it to Philadelphia, Mississippi,
as well. Southern voters are a powerful bloc. But in Ronald Reagan's case, when he appeared before the citizens
of Philadelphia, he spoke of one thing - his support for states' rights. And no matter the argument I've seen
printed that Reagan meant the phrase in the context of the "Sagebrush Rebellion," that focused on wresting
control of western grazing lands from the federal government, we all know what "states' rights" means in the
South.
After he was elected, things didn't get much better.
Take, for instance, the COINTELPRO affair. COINTELPRO was a unit of the FBI formed to combat what was
perceived to be the Communist insurgency. It was later used by J. Edgar Hoover to spy on, and commit both
character assassination and literal assassination of black activists. In 1980 two COINTELPRO officials, L.
Patrick Grey and Edward S. Miller, were convicted of having ""conspired to injure and oppress the citizens of
the United States" while working for the project. The convictions of Grey and Miller were seen by many as a
limited victory
<http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/1999-03/mar10_1999.htm>, but a victory nonetheless for
those interested in the principles of practice of democracy. But Grey and Miller never spent a day in jail. In
1981, while they were awaiting appeal, Reagan pardoned them. Oddly enough, he never pardoned political
prisoners such as Geronimo Pratt, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, and countless others incarcerated wrongly because of the
actions of agents like Grey and Miller.
Beginning in the late 1970s, urban America was hard hit by poverty, crime, and a growing drug scourge with a
little name: crack. Reagan's response was draconian. In order to drum up support for repealing welfare, Reagan
began giving speeches featuring the tale of a woman on welfare who had basically made bank off of running
scams. Through a number of aliases (80, according to Reagan's account) and social security numbers (dozens),
this "welfare queen" was able to buy a Cadillac. He never flat-out said this was a black woman, but the
Cadillac and the reference to Chicago housing projects were as clear a code as his "states' rights" comment in
Mississippi. Naturally, the story was later debunked by the media (there's no way in hell you can live large on
AFDC), but by then the damage had been done, powerfully fusing race, class, and gender to kill support for the
safety net. Americans are now much less likely to support governmental solutions to poverty, particularly when
images associated with the poor are black and female.
Reagan believed that the leaders of organizations like the NAACP were "race merchants" whose only livelihood
was generated by focusing on a mythical racism that didn't exist. As a result his door was never open to them.
Instead, he supported an attempt to generate an alternative black leadership network - one rooted firmly in
support for neoconservative principles. The Fairmont Conference, as it came to be called, was sponsored by
Thomas Sowell and included a pantheon of black conservatives who have gone on to become major figures. Among
the many attendees was one Clarence Thomas. Though black conservatives (who should be differentiated from
conservative blacks) have never had a strong constituency within African American communities, they thrived in
Reagan's administration and were often called upon to make statements on behalf of a constituency that in some
crucial ways they never truly represented.
Remember the Reagan Democrats? Those disaffected working class white voters who were most responsible for
Reagan's re-election in 1984? A group of democratic operatives interviewed a number of white working class men
and women outside of Detroit, in order to see what made Reagan Democrats vote for Reagan. Every social ill
America faced, every problem of the Democratic Party was blamed on one group of people: African Americans. Why
did America lose its moral standing? Black laziness. Why were Americans jobless? Black racial preferences. (I'm
not quite sure how black people could both steal jobs from real Americans, and be too lazy to get jobs in the
first place at the same time, but that's another story.) So even though these Reagan supporters detested
Reagan's actual policy preferences, they gladly supported Reagan because they felt he stood up for them against
the various ills they explicitly associated with black people.
Finally the following data points, taken from Adolph Reed's The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon, bring it
home:
Between January 1981 and the summer of 1984 white longterm unemployment increased 1.5 percent; among blacks,
however, the rate of increase was 72 percent. Moreover...if all budget reductions proposed by the Reagan
administration had been enacted the following programs with disproportionately black constituencies would have
been cut by the following amounts: Legal Services, 100 percent; Public Service Employment, 100 percent; Aid to
Families with Dependent Children, 28 percent; Employment and Training, 43.9 percent; Compensatory Education, 61
percent; Work Incentive Program, 100 percent; Food Stamps, 51.7 percent; and Child Nutrition, 46 percent.
So let me be clear. Inasmuch as I imagine that living the last years of one's life as an Alzheimer victim
would be horrible on one's family, much less on one's self, I would not wish President Reagan's fate on anyone.
My condolences go to his wife, and to his immediate family.
But I became politically aware during President Reagan's tenure. I remember the impact his policies had on
my neighborhood, my parents, and on me. For many of us Reagan didn't bring "morning in America." He brought the
deepest darkest night.
About the Author: Lester Spence is an Assistant Professor in
Political Science and
Afro-American/African Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Afro-American/African Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
