<<Where do you think the Democrats came up with the money to increase spending? Because of Reagan's tax cuts.>>
You don't know ANYTHING about economics. Governmental spending increases the economy, especially middle class spending. Tax cuts to the wealthy have an almost non-effect on the economy. Besides the fact that you apparently can't comprehend what I wrote before.
<<You don't think the wealthy should have had a tax cut? You don't think it helped anything?>>
My beliefs are irrelevant, but in fact no I don't believe they should. Those that benefit most from the american system should bear a heavier burdan than those that suffer under it. But that is irrelevant to this discussion. And no, the reduction in the top bracket from 70% to 36% didn't do anything for our economy other than allowing a large super wealthy class to be created.
<<What do you think started all that extra money rolling into the IRS?>>
Job creation from a cut in interest rates. Plain simple and a proven fact.
<<The rich started investing more since they weren't being unfairly penalized for making money, and guess what: that money started rolling downhill to everyone else.>>
Baloney. The gap between rich and poor for the past 20 years has been increasing. Accounting for inflation the poor are getting poorer. In the CIA WorldFactbook 2000 edition the US entry listed the gap between rich and poor as the US's greatest threat.
<<We can disagree about some of the things Reagan accomplished, but winning the cold war and jump starting the economy are arguments you can't win based on any kind of fact.>>
Oh yes, he did spend the Soviets into collapse on that I do and always have agreed but I will not ever credit him with ANY kind of economic recovery because the facts and history do NOT support it. Alan Greenspan is responsible for the recovery in the 80's and the long running boom of the 90's, the only credit Reagan deserves is for nominating Greenspan to the Fed.
<<I was off on the unemployment number, I was still pretty young in 1980 please forgive me. 1982 the avg unemployment was 9.7% and dropped to 5.5% by 1988.
Unemployment started dropping after the final phase of the taxcuts where in place.>>
You cannot seperate the taxcut data and pork spending that was occuring. Pork spending is MUCH more stimulating to the economy than a tax reduction for 1% of the population ever could be.
<<You are right, the economy grows and that creates more tax income. However the the tax income doubled. The economy did not double in the time period, nor did the number of taxable workers double.>>
Actually the economy did double, where do you think tax revenue comes from? GNP in 1980 was 2784.2B and increased to 5743.8B in 1990. That is about a 60% increase in the GNP, a measure of value of the total economy.
Go here to see GNP data.
One of the options in that link is to government spending and you can view the change from 1980 of 572.8B to 1176.1B in 1990 and see a 500billion increase in spending over a ten year period. If I remember from economics class correctly, goverment $'s spent multiply in the economy by a factor of anywhere from 4-10x. Assuming a 5x multiplication of government spending you end up with 2500B in additional GNP, nearly what the economy increased. Now my analysis is very amatuerish, and if Michael or one of the other CPA's wanna jump in and correct me if I made a big mistake please do it.