There is nothing clandestine about Dugger’s quarry of new material, though Reagan’s staff has done its best to play it down. The material consists of transcripts of several hundred five-minute radio spots that Reagan broadcast after he left Sacramento in 1975; a series that ended the day he announced for president in 1979.
There can be no doubt whatever that these broadcasts express Reagan’s own personal, instinctive attitudes to the important foreign and domestic issues of the day, as opposed to cooler or more cautious or veiled attitudes he may have been advised to express then or later.
Reagan himself, in the last of the broadcasts, states that he wrote them all with his own hand. “I’ve scratched them out on a yellow tablet in airplanes, riding in cars, and at the ranch when the sun went down.”
They reveal him as perhaps a cleverer man than most reporters think he is. You may accept neither his premises nor his conclusions, but you will conclude, I submit, on reading these scripts, that Reagan writes better than you would expect. He has a sure sense of how an issue can be turned, sometimes twisted, to his advantage. And he has a real flair for one-liners.
The transcripts also reveal–and this is the heart of Dugger’s contention–a harder, nastier political style than that of the relaxed, tolerant personality Reagan has so carefully cultivated in the White House.
.. “He was presenting himself to the country as a moderate,” this is Dugger’s key charge, “but these transcripts show that deep down he was a hardline right-wing ideologue with fully formed and recently expressed prejudices on all of the outstanding issues of the day.”
.. The transcripts contain too much that supports this harsh judgment. All the clich,es of the Californian radical right are trotted out without inhibition.
“Eighty per cent of air pollution,” the president believes, “comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes but from plants and trees.” Banning pesticides like DDT leads to “political pollution.” Smoking pot leads to sterility.
.. The social attitudes revealed are uniformly indifferent to the old, the poor, the weak, and always coincide with the interests of the rich, corporations, and the financial Haves. The president is more moved by “the injustice done to Allan Bakke” than by the plight of those on welfare, and it is “demagoguery” to believe that income taxes should be progressive, that is, should increase with the size of incomes.
.. More surprising, and more unpleasant, is the president’s habit of using the sly, indirect way of the propagandist, using code language to suggest more than he quite says right out.
.. He does not explicitly advocate the death penalty, for example. That would sound too bloodthirsty. Instead he quotes with approval the father of a murdered man who says, “after two years the murderer of my son goes free, but my son is dead.” Because the late senator Joe McCarthy did not start to make his unsupported allegations about communists in government until after Alger Hiss had been charged with perjury, it does not follow, as Reagan implies, that those who oppose McCarthyism believe that the Cold War existed only in the minds of reactionaries.
.. There is a good deal of old-fashioned chauvinism to be found in the broadcasts. The Caribbean, Reagan concluded because Michael Manley was prime minister of Jamaica, “is rapidly becoming a communist lake in what should be an American pond.” What should be? The Caribbean basin? The Atlantic? The whole great gulf of ocean itself?
..”Maybe there is an answer–we simply do what’s morally right. Stop doing business with them. Let their system collapse.”
What if it doesn’t collapse?
.. Ronald Reagan is the leader of elements in the government who want the United States to obtain a first- strike capability
.. not all Reagan’s ideas are mistaken. His reaction against the New Deal, as Dugger says, would not have taken him to the White House unless it expressed authentic grievances, genuine second-thoughts about what had been accepted wisdom, real pain experienced by those who had not been preferred targets for the benevolence of the liberal system.
It is true. but that does not make the real Ronald Reagan, revealed behind the mask of amiability in his radio scripts, any less profoundly disturbing.
Four Rules for the Coming Tax Reform Debate
True reform will require a bipartisan consensus around closing loopholes to pay for the lowering of statutory tax rates paid by businesses, and reducing burdens on working families. Changing tax law must be done in a fiscally responsible way, without cutting taxes for the very wealthy.
First, changes in the tax rates for individuals must at least maintain the current levels of progressivity
- Cutting tax rates for the very wealthy would deepen the income inequality that underlies the anxiety and anger among American voters. If Congress doesn’t preserve or increase progressivity, we won’t have the resources to pay for investments like infrastructure and child care.
- .. Congress must also maintain the estate tax, which is levied only on estates worth more than $5.49 million ($10.98 million for a couple), affects only the wealthiest 0.2 percent and protects small businesses, including family farmers.
- .. Many of the estates that are taxed have assets that have increased in value but have never been subject to capital gains tax, and never will be. The idea that the estate tax imposes double taxation is largely a myth.
- Second, tax cuts must be offset by revenue-raising measures. With the country in the ninth year of an economic recovery, the case for pure stimulus is weak, and digging a deep hole of debt by cutting taxes will make it harder to pay for other priorities.
- Tax cuts need to be revenue neutral, paid for by reducing tax subsidies, ending loopholes or generating new revenue.
- Third, Congress should rely on its Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office to estimate what a tax bill will cost.
- Claims that tax cuts pay for themselves must be treated with great skepticism.
- Such a reckless move would almost surely produce an explosion of debt. In 1981, 2001 and 2003, tax cuts based on projections that they would largely pay for themselves did not, and when deficits soared, future presidents had to make hard choices to restore fiscal stability.
- Fourth, business tax reform must not open up new loopholes for top earners to evade taxes. Proposals to lower the tax rate on “pass-through” income (income that partnerships, sole proprietorships, S corporations and limited-liability companies “pass through” to owners) would create a costly, unpoliceable loophole. Wealthy individuals and businesses could easily reorganize on paper to take advantage of low pass-through rates.
- most pass-through income goes to wealthy individuals and big businesses like hedge funds and large oil and gas pipeline companies organized as limited partnerships.
- Kansas instituted a similar policy in 2012 and repealed it this year after 100,000 new pass-throughs emerged — among them the coach of the University of Kansas basketball team, who had his salary paid to a pass-through entity to escape state income tax. Yet job and economic growth in Kansas lagged that of most neighboring states, evidence that the policy did not produce the growth that supporters promised
The Case Against the CBO
That criticism is correct, and Republicans should make alterations so that a lot more people get covered. But the criticism is also exaggerated.
.. But the CBO has gotten its estimates badly wrong before. Before Congress enacted Obamacare, the office projected that by this year, its exchanges would enroll 23 million people. As late as June 2015, the CBO was sticking to this projection. The actual number is about nine million.
.. Its report then added, “Most of those reductions in coverage would stem from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate.”
.. If this is right, the implication is that many people who would “lose” coverage after the partial repeal of Obamacare would be better described as people who would drop their coverage. They are buying it only to avoid the fines, and do not think their coverage is worth what they are paying for it... But would millions of people really leave Medicaid if the fines ended? Would they really, that is, stop taking advantage of a free program?.. If you’re a health-policy staffer for a leading congressional Republican, advocating for more generous tax credits for people with low incomes would require taking on conservatives who object to progressivity. And even if you win that fight, the CBO might still say that coverage will decline substantially without the individual mandate.