Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009

Health Care: Do the Right Thing on Taxes

“You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” Vice President Dick Cheney famously told George W. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill. Cheney, who rarely allows facts to get in the way of a good ideology, was retailing a myth. Ronald Reagan is remembered for the massive tax cuts passed during his first year in office. But since deficits do matter — and since Reagan’s so-called supply-side cuts blasted an enormous hole in the budget — the President had to come back in 1982 with the largest peacetime tax increase in American history: the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which raised $37.5 billion, or 1% of gross domestic product (GDP), per year. He also signed a $3.3 billion gasoline-tax increase. The next year, he signed another whopping tax hike, designed to save Social Security.
A second prevailing myth of the Reagan Administration, quietly peddled by budget director David Stockman, went like this: O.K., supply-side economics is a phony, but we can use the growth of budget deficits as an argument for limiting the growth of government. That didn’t work out so well either. The public demanded its entitlement programs — deficits be damned — and a strong defense, and loved having politicians who secured funding for a Yo-Yo Hall of Fame in their district. Deficits grew until the combined actions of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton caused the deficits to stop growing. How, you might ask, did they manage that? They raised taxes. Somehow the economy not only survived, it prospered. (See pictures of tea-party tax protests.) Continue reading “Why Taxes Are Necessary to Pay for Health Care Reform – TIME”