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| TARP Republican |
Sen. Tom Coburn comes to bury Caesar, not to praise him, here:
"The last time Congress reformed the tax code was 26 years ago, which preceded the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history."
What's wrong with that? you say.
Well, that statement dates the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history from after 1986, ignoring that it actually began much earlier as a result of Reagan's stimulative tax cuts in the early 1980s. Now why would a Republican ignore that? Maybe because he's a Bush Republican who hates voodoo economics, the ungrateful louts who never defended the Gipper against the left's attacks then and still won't.
What's worse is that Sen. Coburn goes on to pretend that Reagan viewed tax credits with scorn like Martin Feldstein does:
Reagan’s key economic advisers such as Martin Feldstein persuasively argue that tax extenders are spending by another name. If tax carve-outs for green industry, rum makers, Eskimo whaling captains, and more, were on the other side of the ledger – such as in President Obama’s stimulus bill – they would be derided as spending, and rightly so.
Actually, Reagan defended spending through the tax code, for example, through the Earned Income Credit which he expanded considerably in the very 1986 tax reform Coburn praises, to get people off of welfare and into work.
Martin Feldstein may have been Reagan's economic advisor, but he was a deficit hawk who often collided with Reagan over spending, and left the service of the president after only two years, in 1984.
To rewrite the history of Ronald Reagan as Coburn does is completely dishonest.
