February 25, 2016
Jacob Weisberg wasn’t quite straight with readers when he said that Ronald Reagan supported “Keynesian stimulus” in a NYT column on how the Republican Party has changed since the days of Reagan. The Keynesian stimulus took the form of a large permanent tax cut that was highly skewed toward the wealthy. He also had large increases in military spending.
The current crew of Republican presidential candidates seems to be very much in this same mode, also urging large tax cuts that would primarily benefit the wealthy and spending more on the military. Reagan did agree to roll back some of his tax cut when it appeared that deficits were getting too large in 1982 and 1983. We can’t know whether the Republican candidates would be prepared to raise taxes again if deficits were leading to high interest rates and/or inflation, but in their platforms they are very much following Reagan, contrary to what Weisberg claims.
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