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Originally Posted by detbuch
So you swallowed that version of "history." The other version is that Congress never gave Reagan the spending cuts he asked for. But let's not confuse spending and taxes. Regardless of Got Stripers point about the necessity of them being parallel policies (One without the other leads either to deficit or surplus), spending is the sine qua non of progressive governance because, for it, government is involved in every aspect of the people's lives.
Progressivism is essentially more concerned with power than with budgets. So, in order for "Conservatives" to get policies approved, there has to be a Progressive "balance" which means more must be spent than collected. Ironically, government debt leads to top down government power.
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That is how politics works in a democracy, not just one person gets to choose, remember Congress is elected by the voters also. Things don't just materialize in politics without a lot of work. It's easy to sell the popular stuff.
When Ronald Reagan arrived in Washington in 1981, circumstances were very different than they are today. Inflation was nearly 10 percent. The Federal Reserve had pushed interest rates into double digits. The federal debt was about half what it is today, measured as a share of the economy. The Reagan tax cut was huge. The top rate fell from 70 percent to 50 percent. The tax cut didn’t pay for itself. According to later Treasury estimates, it reduced federal revenues by about 9 percent in the first couple of years. In fact, most of the top Reagan administration officials didn’t think the tax cut would pay for itself. They were counting on spending cuts to avoid blowing up the deficit. But they never materialized.