Reaganism

Ronald Reagan was elected on a platform with two planks: 1. Government is bad, even evil, and 2. That taxes are way too high. Republicans, in their adoration for all things Reagan, have been doing their best to prove him right on the first plank. The leaders of both houses of Congress, McConnell and Boehner, have done their level best to see to it that government, indeed, is bad. Under Republican control, government has been about as bad as you can get. It doesn’t do anything! Taxes, the dues we pay as citizens to finance the function of government were never “too high”, they have merely been poorly targeted and, if anything, way too low to generate the kind of revenue necessary to allow the government to do much of anything. We had a pretty good system working before Reagan came along. Since then the Reagan/ Bush tax cuts have caused the national debt to balloon out of all proportion to what it would be if Reagan and Bush had targeted the income tax toward those who can most easily afford to pay. Republicans, in their constant bemoaning about the debt we are passing on to our grandchildren, never, ever, mention the origin of a major chunk of that debt, nor do they give any hint at the way to start whittling it down, which is simply to get rid of Reaganism, once and for all, restore a progressive tax structure, and allow the government to do what we elect it to do.