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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (126751)	2/13/2001 9:49:22 PM
From: ecommerceman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Neocon--I'm glad that you agree that Reagan was overly sanguine about matching spending cuts with revenue. However, I think you're wrong about Stockman--he didn't chicken out, he realized that the course that they were taking was disastrous (and it wasn't because he was a liberal, to say the least--he was very conservative), and he couldn't abide it any longer. I don't think you're right at all about it not mattering much, either, as the deficits we ran up then were incredibly large (and, like I said, with Democratic and Republican help in the Congress). As for tax reform, that was--as most people acknowledge--an initiative that was passed almost primarily from the efforts of Bill Bradley (who introduced it in the Senate), and to a lesser degree from Richard Gephardt, who introduced it in the House. True, Reagan signed it--and gets credit for doing it, but it's passage through the Congress had very little to do with Reagan, and almost all to do with Bradley. As for other deregulation initiatives, I am pretty certain that Ted Kennedy was the prime sponsor of airline deregulation in the late 70s, and I think he was heavily involved, also, with trucking deregulation (less sure about that, though). And, as you may remember, natural gas deregulation was an initiative of Jimmy Carter, who took a lot of heat for it from liberals.... _________________________ I think that it is true enough that Reagan was overly sanguine about matching spending cuts with revenue. But I think that Stockmann simply didn't understand that it didn't matter much, as time has borne out, and chickened out as a conventional Republican deficit hawk. And while it is true that there was some interest in tax reform on the Democratic side, and that some deregulation occurred in the Carter Administration, it is overblown to make out that the extent of each was primarily a matter of Democratic initiatives. Some Democrats were interested, sure. Some of them, like Phil Gramm, eventually became Republicans. The real split, of course, was not Democrat/Republican, but liberal/conservative, and it was mainly conservatives and occasional moderates who showed an interest in tax reform and deregulation. Heck, I was a Democrat myself in the 80s, though a Reagan supporter......