Somewhere along my Internet wanderings, I got myself signed up for e-mails from the National Tea Party Alert. Whatever they are — it’s still not clear to me, really, though they do at least seem conservative — the National Tea Party Alert sent me this email on Monday: “Throwing the Gipper Under the Bus.”
Key bit:
House republicans, led by John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan have insisted that no tax increases are up for discussion, with Speaker Boehner saying, “…tax increases are unacceptable and are a nonstarter”
Oddly enough, the record shows that supply side cheerleader Ronald Reagan himself incorporated tax increases into his economic recovery plans, most famously into 1982’s Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, though there were four more tax increases in the remaining six years of his presidency, with a total of $190 billion (in today’s dollars) in revenue increases coming from those tax hikes. That’s an amount significantly above what Vice President Biden is calling for during the recent deficit talks with GOP leaders.
Today Ezra Klein posts the chart above, by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which gets along well with that Tea Party Alert about the Gipper. Again, the mix of spending cuts and tax increases that President Obama has proposed is nearly exactly what Republicans themselves said they wanted in March — and nearly the opposite of President Reagan’s approach.
P.S. The National Tea Party alert has something to do with these folks.
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