A Final Report Card on the Reagan Years?

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



A Final Report Card
on the Reagan Years?

Our current economic meltdown may finally have ended the era that began when Ronald Reagan became President. Now a new study — from the Congressional Budget Office — helps us understand the inequality that has us melting.

January 5, 2009

By Sam Pizzigati


Two days before Christmas, with hardly anyone at all paying much attention, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office delivered up a final report card on the Reagan era. The highest grades? They went, almost exclusively, to the super rich.

You won't, to be sure, find any As, Bs, and Fs in this new Congressional Budget Office report card. And the CBO's researchers certainly didn't set out to grade America on the years since Ronald Reagan became President a generation ago. But they've done just that. On taxes and income distribution, their new report makes vividly clear, the United States desperately "needs improvement."

That may or may not be the message Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus from Montana had in mind, last year, when he asked the Congressional Budget Office to dig a little deeper into the data on taxes and income than the CBO had dug in a report released late in 2007.

The CBO's December 2007 study, Historical Effective Tax Rates, 1979 to 2005, had looked at the federal taxes Americans at different income levels have been paying since the year before Ronald Reagan's election. But the report had a hole. Nothing in it indicated how the really rich have fared in the near three decades that the basic principles of Reaganomics — tax rate cuts, deregulation, and privatization — have set the public policy pace.

Senate Finance Committee chair Baucus asked the CBO to fill that hole — by focusing on the richest of the rich. The CBO's new report meets that request, with dramatic results.

Americans in the overall top 1 percent, the 2007 CBO data showed, did quite well in the Reagan era's first quarter-century. Their average incomes, after taking inflation into account, essentially tripled, rising 201 percent. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/jan5a.html

[musette_sf]

1. K&R

we gotta get right back to where it started from... the Reagan poison...