Ours Was the Shining Future by David Leonhardt

Author:David Leonhardt [Leonhardt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

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THE DOWNFALL OF Gorsuch and Bork fit with a larger sense of disappointment that some conservatives felt about Reagan’s presidency. He suffered failures and did not always govern as ambitiously as he spoke. In the 1960s, he had opposed Medicare as a form of socialism and had criticized Social Security. As president, he protected both programs from large cuts. He did not eliminate any cabinet departments. He signed a tax increase in 1982 that reversed a portion of his 1981 tax cut. His Supreme Court appointees, except for Scalia, were sometimes disappointing, too.

But these disappointments could obscure the big picture. The Reagan revolution was real.

Almost a half century earlier, Roosevelt and his allies in Congress had refashioned the American economy, raising taxes, regulating business, and strengthening labor unions in unprecedented ways. In the decades that followed, this basic structure remained intact. The scope of government fluctuated within a narrow range. Republican presidents accepted the consensus and sometimes expanded government’s role. Eisenhower oversaw larger increases in government investments than any other modern president and appointed a liberal chief justice friendly to regulation. Nixon created more federal agencies than any president since Roosevelt.

Reagan ended that era. He ended it with help from intellectuals like Bork, power brokers like Walker, and government officials like Gorsuch. “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America,” Barack Obama said while running for president decades later. “He put us on a fundamentally different path.” True, Reagan suffered setbacks, as all presidents do, and, true, Reagan was willing to compromise when he thought it benefited him and his cause. To refuse compromise, in his view, was naïve. “On nearly all issues, Reagan was simultaneously an ideologue and a pragmatist,” Cannon, the biographer, wrote. Reagan occasionally complained to aides that some hardcore conservatives preferred to lose and remain pure than make progress. “I’d rather get 80 percent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flag flying,” Reagan said. His 80 percent transformed the American economy.

The big exception was government spending. Reagan did not reduce spending on social programs as he had suggested he would. But his presidency was a turning point for tax policy and government regulation. The top marginal income tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office. It fell to 50 percent in 1982 and to 28 percent in 1989, when he left office. It has never again exceeded 39.6 percent. Tax rates on stock holdings, corporate profits, and inheritances also fell during his presidency. Together, these cuts produced a sharp decline in total tax payments by the wealthy. In 1980, rich American households paid almost half of their income in combined federal, state, and local taxes. Since Reagan, this combined rate has been closer to 35 percent.

Reagan also ushered in a new combativeness toward labor unions, starting with his firing the air traffic controllers in 1981. It helped him that they belonged to a distinctly unsympathetic union and typified labor’s entitled attitude. After endorsing Reagan in the 1980 campaign, the

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