The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society Into the Economic Society by Mark A. Smith

Author:Mark A. Smith [Smith, Mark A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Parties, Political Science, Political Process, Propaganda
ISBN: 9781400830718
Google: xyy3e0rNSjgC
Goodreads: 17035256
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2007-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Supply-Side Economics and Reagan's Coalition Building

Intellectual movements commonly precede innovations in the political realm, a tendency illustrated well by the linkage between supply-side economics and Reagan's rhetoric. The renewed intellectual case for supply-side economics emerged mostly between Reagan's 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns, thereby providing rhetorical opportunities to sustain his long-standing advocacy of tax cuts. Throughout his political career he fought high taxes and especially progressive income taxes. Reagan made supply-side arguments as early as 1958, though prior to 1980 he did not frame the issue predominantly in those terms.35 During the 1976 campaign challenging Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, Reagan could have proposed supply-side tax cuts as a solution for the nation's economic problems; the decline in economic security that began in 1973, after all, was in full swing. The former California governor asked for reductions in government spending but not for large tax cuts. The intellectual movement for supply-side economics had just begun to gel, and so Reagan did not have full access to what would soon offer a fund of powerful rhetorical resources for cutting taxes and reducing progressivity.

By 1980 the case for supply-side economics had been widely disseminated through op-eds, reports, books, and articles in opinion journals, allowing Reagan to claim that he could simultaneously reduce taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the budget because of the greater revenues the tax cuts would generate. To be sure, the doctrines Reagan embraced were regularly challenged, and George H. W. Bush famously called them “voodoo economics.” But if in 1980 the claims were controversial, only four years earlier they would have been inconceivable. During the 1976 election, let alone the 1964 contest that pitted Goldwater against Johnson, a candidate could not have made the promises Reagan would later utter without being dismissed as ignorant about economics. The intellectual movement for supplyside economics helped transform an idea previously seen as foolish into one often deemed plausible or even probable. Intellectual developments, then, opened up possibilities for political change, and Reagan soon capitalized on them.

After Reagan's victory in the 1980 election, supply-side economics added rhetorical leverage that proved valuable in constructing a coalition sufficiently large to enact the tax cut into law. Reagan won nearly unanimous support in both the House of Representatives and the Senate among Republicans, an achievement underwhelming in retrospect but noteworthy at the time because of the party's historical commitment to balanced budgets. Skeptics of the revenue-raising potential of lower tax rates, such as Howard Baker, the majority leader of the Republican-controlled Senate, and Pete Domenici, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, accepted revenue forecasts that they previously might have deemed unrealistic. Reagan also won the consent of many Democrats, a vital step to victory given that Republicans did not hold the majority in the House of Representatives. On July 29, 1981, in the key vote to adopt the Reagan-backed tax bill as a substitute for the version passed by the Ways and Means Committee, fortyeight Democrats joined a winning coalition with all the Republicans save one to bring Reagan's tax plan closer to enactment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.