Tripleshot, i think you might be redeemable after all... you at least seem open and receptive to logical argument
First, my comment ridiculing the statement, "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer," was a slight misquote from the article you posted. The actual quote should have been "the rich got richer, while worker's wages stayed stagnant." I apologize for the misquotation, but not the sentiment. Even when quoted properly, it belies a socialist, class-warfare line of thought. Or another line i'm especially fond of from that same article, "...nothing worth having ever trickles down." They were both quotes from the article you posted, would you care to defend, or even explain either of those statements? A diatribe against an idea does not serve as a convincing argument against the same (even if it wasn't your original argument)
To those two sentiments the article expressed, I rebutt the following anecdote, since they were both anecdotes themselves - A socialist is a man who looks at a rich man's mansion, and says "no man should have a house like that." The capitalist is a man who looks at the house, and says "every man should have the chance to have a house like that."
Okay, you advance the argument that the 80s and the Reagan years were a time of shaky financial status, changing corporate law, high interest rates, and rising budget deficits. And, as you state, a lot of how you perceive the 80s depends on your point of view. Well, I won't attempt to speak to the state of mind of all folks back then (although i was around too, and so were most of the people i know). If we're going to go with anecdotal evidence though, pretty much everyone i know remembers the 80s as a time of relative prosperity, especially after the Stagflation days of the 70s before it.
Let's go through your points one at a time. As for "shaky financial status," i think we can agree that is a highly personal issue, that generalizations can't do justice to. Plenty of people did great in the 80s, some not so great. And i'd say that has as much to do with the vagaries of fortune, as did any policies or secondary factors. I believe it is fair to say that the economy was in an expansion (as measured by economists) for most of Reagan's term, and the 80s as a whole. That means opportunities existed for those who sought to pursue them. That not all might have achieved as highly as might have liked - well, that's the human condition. This was not the Great Depression we're talking about. So let's agree to this - i won't claim that the 80s were great for everyone, and you won't claim they sucked for everyone, deal?
Changing corporate law - partially true, but that's not Reagan's doing. Statutory law is passed by Congress, not the President. He might have influenced the legislation, true, but he is not the cause of it. What Reagan could and did influence, however, was the enforcement of regulatory oversight. In most cases, he backed off the levels of regulation significantly. Again, it's impossible to argue in a blanket fashion whether or not this had positive effects in every instance - it would be necessary to do so on a case by case basis. My opinion is that less regulation is generally to be preferred over more. You might disagree.
As for interest rates being high, that is true for a portion of Reagan's term, although he was not directly responsible. The credit/blame for that should go rightfully to a Reagan appointee, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker. Volker's argument for doing so was to combat the high inflation that was running rampant at the time. And in that effort, he (Volker) was spectacularly successful. Real inflation declined from the teens in 1981-1982 to a more natural (for the period) level of about 5% by about mid to late 1983. Was it worth skying interest rates temporarily to 18% in order to kill the Stagflation dragon? I think it was. Current economists think so as well, and hold Volker to be perhaps the best Fed Chairman ever. Again, you might differ.
Now, on to a different matter. You state that i seem "lukewarm" to supply-side economics as well. Well, i don't know about lukewarm - i just honestly recognize its limitations. The effect of supply side economic policies, especially tax policies, show their greatest effects when
taxes are high to begin with. The effects are much less, and moving towards neglible, when rates are low. Let me give an example.
Let's say we have two (theoretical) tax payers, one paying a top marginal rate of 99%, and the other paying 2%. If we cut both of their rates by 50%, which do you think will have the greater effect? Just as the top marginal tax rates are as unnaturally high in our 99% scenario, so they were also when Reagan took office (70%). You should see why supply-side would work much better when rates were 70%, than it would now, that the top marginal tax rate is about 39%. The point is that having the top rates above a certain level (and 70% is certainly above the threshhold, i would argue), serves as an extremely potent disincentive for any investor. At a certain level, the disincentive effectively disappears, and further rate cuts serve rather as an incentive, but an increasingly small one. That's because the numbers involved keep getting smaller. Again, if the top rate was 2%, cutting the rate a further 50% only yields an effective 1% of extra available investment capital. Comparing the two effects, removing disincentives is much more powerful than raising incentives of the two effects. Reagan, IMHO, understood this, and unleashed far more powerful forces by his action.
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