The Reagan legacy on spending

on

As time passes, it may be possible for widespread critical evaluation of Ronald Reagan, both the good things he did, and the bad. Nick Gillespie of Reason reports some facts about the Reagan record and on Senator Rand Paul’s speaking accurately about it, concluding: “Take on Reagan’s legacy and you’re playing with fire. Especially if you’re right about Reagan’s terrible record on spending, which Rand Paul absolutely is.”

After trimming some programs early in his presidency, Reagan came around to pushing massive increases on just about everything, including education (a newly formed federal department he promised to kill upon taking office), Medicare (which he had denounced as “socialized medicine” in the early 1960s), and Social Security (before championing massive hikes in payroll taxes in his second term, he had once called for making Social Security voluntary).

In many ways, Reagan’s late-life embrace of old-age entitlements may have been his worst spending legacy. Created to address very different times and a very different workforce, Social Security and Medicare were in dire straits by the 1980s and had Reagan tried, he might have been able to replace these fundamentally unsustainable and unfair transfer programs into more effective and lower-cost safety net programs. Instead he called saving Social Security and Medicare—a feat accomplished through massive increases in FICA rates—”the highest priority of my administration.” By the end of his presidency, the combined employee-employer rate was 15 percent, up from 9.35 percent in 1981 (and more income was subjected to Social Security tax to boot).

As I argued the other day at The Daily Beast, Reagan is the “Godfather of Groupon Government,” of huge and ongoing discounts to current taxpayers. Just as Groupon makes purchases more attractive by offering major price breaks, Groupon Goverment makes government goods and services more attractive by charging taxpayers much less than the retail price.

The full story is Rand Paul Is Right: Carter Was Thriftier Than Reagan.

Comments

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.