I have no opinion, but remind that we have listen to warnings since before Reagan's tax cuts in 1981.
And after. Except that a) both parties agreed even if only tacitly that there'd be no shrinkage in major
spending programs; and, b) the Republican side of that tacit agreement meant more than half the
Reagan tax cut was lost between 1985 and 1989. The 1981 budget cuts notwithstanding,
not one
major spending program was abolished during the Reagan era. Even Reagan himself wasn't
interested in cutting spending so much as keeping it from increasing past x levels. (Education
secretary Terrell Bell's being told of "the great distinction that would be mine if I could, some day
early in the Reagan administration, walk into the Oval Office and hand the president the keys to
the Department of Education and say, 'Well, we've shut the abominable thing down. Here's one
useless government agency out of the way,' was just one example, considering Bell actually had
no intention of seeing that shutdown happen---indeed, handing it over to William Bennett, under
whose aegis three-quarters of the education spending that hiked between 1981 and 1989
occurred.)
And, we saw for ourselves what happened in the second Bush administration. Good tax cuts aplenty. And
a
Republican government---you know, the one Reagan
really didn't have, control of both
houses of Congress, and how many years did we hear that all we needed was an across-the-board
Republican government before we could
really put the beast in its proper places?---going drunken
sailor.
I'm all in favour of tax cuts. But I don't want to be around when
this Republican government goes drunken
sailor, too.
