OK, let's take a look at the decade of the eighties. Researchable (by those who are interested in the truth) statistics show that the eighties was a period of the strongest growth and prosperity in this country's history. The period between 1982 and 1990 included 96 continuous months of economic growth and expansion. That's the longest period of such expansion that has ever been recorded in peacetime.
During that period, about 20 million jobs were created (in private industry, where they actually add to the nation's wealth, rather than just make-work projects such as you get from the power seekers) and we're not talking about minimum wage jobs either.
At the same time, we brought (liberal) Jimmy Carter's double-digit inflation down to acceptable levels.
Interest rates came back down to manageable levels and the stock market increased in value by about 300%. (That's a tripling in value during what the liberals call the worst economic periods in the history of the nation.
Average real family income increased more than 15% between 1982 and 1989 while income for the poorest one-fifth of Americans rose about 12%. Even at a time when the tax percentages for both rich and poor dropped drastically, the richest 1% paid 40% more taxes than in 1980 while the bottom 60% paid 20% less.
The total number of people with incomes below the poverty line dropped by 3.8 million people between 1983 and 1989.
And Reagan didn't decimate poverty programs. In fact, federal poverty programs increased from $140 billion in 1982 to $180 billion in 1991 (in 1991 dollars).
And yes, while the deficit did rise to $230 billion between 1985 and 1986, what the looters would rather you didn't know is the fact that between 1987 and 1989, when the real economic growth reached its full potential, the deficit dropped to $150 billion in spite of unchecked spending by a liberal congress which spent $1.25 for every dollar of the increase in tax "take!"
So Reagan managed to undo the results of years of liberal "tax and spend" policies, even while saddled with a liberal Congress. So we still have a chance to roll it all back, if we can just maintain the courage of our convictions.
And of course, during the Reagan years, when the top tax percentage paid by all taxpayers went from 70% down to 28%, the total tax take almost doubled from $550 billion to $991 billion!
Which just goes to show that when you give rich people more money to play with, they invest it in the things that make more jobs for those of us who don't have as much money, and therefore everybody pays more taxes on more new income.
I know it's hard for many uninformed people to believe, but your government (at all levels) lies to you routinely. They will tell you lies when the truth would serve better. One of the hardest things for me to accept as I became more knowledgeable was that people in my government were as dishonest as they come. It's full of criminals, from bottom to top (Excluding many good people who also work for the government. They know, better than we do, who the dishonest bureaucrats are, since they have to work with them!). But don't ever let them sucker you into thinking that the Reagan years were anything but what they were: the best thing to have ever happened to this country in the last 40 to 50 years.
We can win. We proved it in 1994. Now we need to keep at it.
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