The basic point of the article is that Reagan had a proven track record of compromising with Democrats and raising taxes when necessary on several occasions. He even decried threats to not raise the debt limit. All of this stuff is a matter of historical record and can easily be checked.
As is their custom, the paper offered the opportunity for an opposing viewpoint. They got one from Lee Edwards, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and author of The Essential Ronald Reagan. Since the facts cited by USA Today are indisputable, I was curious to read what Edwards would offer in rebuttal.
His approach was pretty simple: ignore the USA Today article, botch some statistics, and misstate some data--a more confrontational person would accuse him of lying, but that's not my style. Quoting from his response:
Reagan raised the debt ceiling some 18 times because he was confident that in the long run, his program would create jobs and substantially increase government revenues as they did, nearly doubling between 1980 and 1990.This is the same type of mendacity (whoops, I should watch my civility) that I complained about with Joe Scarborough and Jim DeMint. Edwards cites meaningless raw numbers that indeed show that revenues increased from $517 billion to slightly over $1 trillion in the 1980s, nearly doubling. However, if you simply index the numbers to inflation, which was much higher in the 80s than it is now, the increase is from $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in constant 1985 dollars, an increase of only 26%. An even better metric is to look at revenues as a percentage of GDP. In 1980 they were 21%. The figure in 1990? 19%. In other words, the data shows exactly the opposite of what Edwards claims of them. Reagan's policies lowered, not raised, the amount of revenue the government collected compared to the size of the economy.
Next, he claims the following.
The act (Regan's tax cuts) produced 92 months of economic growth--the longest period of peacetime economic growth in the post-WWII period--and 17 million new jobs in the Reagan presidency.The 92 months he refers to is from the 2nd quarter of 1982 through the 3rd quarter of 1990. The government doesn't publish monthly GDP data. It provides quarterly data. The quarters both before and after this period saw a substantial decrease in growth. After a drop in growth in the 4th quarter of 1990, the U.S. did not experience a single quarter in which growth fell until the 2008 calamity, a period of 28 years! This is a substantially longer period of uninterrupted growth than the 92-month figure quoted by Edwards. Furthermore, in the Clinton administration alone more than 22 million jobs were created, again substantially outpacing the jobs-growth figure of the Reagan years. This performance occurred after Bush I and Clinton raised marginal tax rates on the wealthy, something Heritage Foundation fellows do not typically mention.
Finally,
Here at home, by the end of the Reagan presidency, the federal deficit as a share of GDP had fallen from 6.3% in 1983 to 2.9% in 1989.Notice, he is aware of the % of GDP data. He just cites it selectively only when it supports his overall point and ignores it when it doesn't. Since the earlier statistic Edwards cited about government revenues compared 1980 to 1990, you might wonder why this statistic compares 1983 to 1989? He picks 1983 as his baseline (two years into the Reagan presidency) because the deficit was artificially high due to the deep recession the country was in. If you instead use as your baseline 1981, the year Reagan was inaugurated, the deficit as a % of GDP was 2.8%. And when he left office in 1989? It was 3.0%.
And what does Edwards have to say about the points made in the USA Today editorial regarding Reagan's willingness to compromise and to raise taxes when necessary that he was presumably rebutting? Nothing. He simply ignores them.
This is partisan hackery at its highest level.
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