Bartlett: Don't Forget Reagan's Tax Increases
Bruce Bartlett blogs:
I see that former Senator Alan Simpson, co-chair of the deficit reduction commission, is angry with anti-tax fanatics for saying that he supported tax increases while in the Senate. Without checking his voting record, I think it's reasonable to assume that Simpson, like almost all Republicans in the Senate in the 1980s, probably voted for the many tax increases supported and signed into law by Ronald Reagan, which eventually took back half of the 1981 tax cut (see below).
It may come as a surprise to some people that once upon a time in the not-too-distant past Republicans actually cared enough about budget deficits that they thought raising taxes was necessary to bring them down. Today, Republicans believe that deficits are nothing more than something to ignore when they are in power and to bludgeon Democrats with when they are out of power.
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