Selective Blindness: Today's 'Conservatives' Conveniently Forget that Reagan Raised Taxes 6 Times in 8 years

You mean Saint Reagan the Conservative icon?  Was really a 'tax and spend' liberal??  You see it's an either or question.  Black and white.  You're either for us, or against us.  Obama sucks.  You either raise taxes or you don't.    Wait a minute, Rush Limbaugh never told me this!?  WTF?????!!!



At a public hearing of the commission, Simpson said that one of the “myths, and the misconceptions, and the distortions and, as one president said, the plain damn lies” promulgated by the right is that Reagan didn’t raise taxes when the situation called for it. As Simpson pointed out, he most certainly did:

Let’s just disengage ourselves from the myth that Ronald Reagan never raised taxes. He did. And here are four big ones. So I hope this will clear the air for some of the groups today. In 1982, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, that rolled back about a third of his ‘81 tax cuts, raised corporate tax rates, and to a lesser extent income tax rates. Raised taxes by almost one percent of GDP, which at that time was the largest percentage in peacetime increase ever. 1982 gas tax increase, 1983 Greenspan commission raised payroll taxes…Then there was the 1984 deficit reduction tax…Then there was the Railroad Retirement Revenue Act, Consolidated Omnibus Budget of ‘85…So there were a lot of them. Just thought I’d throw that in.