FRAME: Are Republicans willing to admit that Ronald Reagan was a Socialist?

[zulchzulu]

Granted, the term "socialist", which is being bandied about by the GOP, like a Little River Band reunion concert in some trailer park, is a tired and overused retread for half-wits, dittoheads and their ilk.

What needs to be mentioned whenever a Republican starts throwing the term "socialist" around that they need to be reminded of how Ronald Reagan could be seen as asocialist by today's "standards".

There's something called the Earned Income Tax Credit:

Enacted in 1975, the initially modest EIC has been expanded by tax legislation on a number of occasions, including the more widely-publicized Reagan EIC expansion of 1986.<...>

Today, the EITC is one of the largest anti-poverty tools in the United States (despite the fact that most income measures, including the poverty rate, do not account for the credit), and enjoys broad bipartisan support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_Income_Tax_Credit

This subject was brought up during the past election where Palin and McCain were calling Obama a "socialist". Look where it got them...

[muntrv]

1. If my history is correct, Conrail was nationalized during the Nixon/Ford administrations.

Thus they would be "socialist."

[margotb822]

2. Republicans don't actually know what Socialist means

They use Socialist and Fascist interchangeably, which they're not. They think it sounds "unamerican," so they use it as a weapon. However, given the fact that essentially everyone under 30-35 has no practical knowledge of the Cold War and really can only compare the Clinton and Bush administrations, we can see that calling Democrats socialists is impractical and will get them nowhere with younger generations, poor and minorities.