Willravel

Let's say there's a little boy named Ronald running a lemonade stand. He inherited the stand from Jimmy, who did alright but was never really all that popular with the rest of the neighborhood and ended up a little in the hole, just like the stand was when he got it. Ronald figured that a great way to boost business would be to lower prices and stock up on better, more expensive lemonade ingredients, to really entice buyers. He spent money he didn't have on organic lemons and cane sugar, and dropped the prices significantly. He did end up selling a bit more lemonade, but he'd gone way overboard on lowering prices and investing in ingredients and found himself in serious debt. He'd gone from a debt of 2.7% of the stand's total product to 6%. He started raising prices to compensate, but the debt kept rising as the days turned to weeks. By the time Ronald gave the stand over to George, the growth he had expected from reducing the cost of the lemonade and increasing spending on ingredients had meant very little overall income increase (2.5%). That might sound commendable, but when Bill was running the stand for the same amount of time and having to deal with a much bigger deficit, he managed to grow the stand's revenues 4.1% with a more pragmatic policy of keeping the cost of lemonade in line with costs.

The Reagan administration raised taxes twice in 1982, and in 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987 and even with all those tax increases, they still couldn't possibly hope to tackle the insane Federal budget deficit created as a direct result of the their poor tax policies. The Reagan administration's stupid spending increases forced Bush1 AND Clinton to continue raising taxes until the budget was finally balanced to a point in the 90s, only to have supply side voodoo jump right back in under Bush2 with tax cuts for the rich and spending increases again. Why is it you can't see lowering taxes and increasing spending is poor fiscal policy? Seriously, there's no doubt at all that under Reagan and Bush2, spending increased significantly and taxes decreased and there's absolutely no doubt the deficit grew under Reagan and Bush2 at levels unprecedented outside of having a world-wide war.

This isn't a matter up to opinion. Reagan's tax policies did not create as much growth as Clinton's. There was a 2.5% increase in tax revenues from 1979 to 1989 and a 4.1% increase from 1989 to 2000. Economic growth comes from sound fiscal policy, where taxation and spending are at least in the same general area. It provides natural confidence in the markets (as opposed to artificial confidence created by deregulation). Reaganomics, lowering taxes, increasing spending, deregulating banking and investment, and supply side voodoo, doesn't work. It just doesn't.