Of course, Reagan wrote that in his diary because if he had said it out loud, the Democrats would have shouted him down. Back in the day, I used to cover the progress of each Reagan budget on its tortured path through Congress. Budget resolutions, reconciliation bills, rescissions, supplementals—I saw ‘em all, over and over again.
What happened was this: Reagan would demand sharp cuts in domestic discretionary spending, and the Democrats would refuse. But Reagan would also demand sharp increases in defense spending, and the Democrats would cut those in half. Inevitably, and invariably, the Democratic budget would be about $100 million less than the Reagan budget.
Furthermore, Reagan forgot (as he forgot so many things) that he had a Republican Senate for six of his eight years. He also had the veto, which somehow he rarely got around to using. Furthermore, though Reagan did hold the line on domestic discretionary spending (pretty much), he had a back door, the notorious package of savings & loans “reforms” passed in 1982 that turned sleepy S&Ls into money machines for unscrupulous owners, who ran up a tab of $88 billion, as measured in 1995 dollars. One thing that made George Bush Sr. so unpopular (and made him raise taxes) was paying off the bills for Ronnie’s party.
Ronald Reagan was a lot of things, but close with a dollar he was not. It was Ronald Reagan who ran the federal debt from $1 trillion to $3.5 trillion in eight years, who taught us that deficits don’t matter—so history repeats itself, the first time as Ronald Reagan, the second as Dick Cheney. Yeah, things do get ugly in a hurry.
Afterwords
Ron Paul exposed Ronnie’s tax and tax and tax and spend and spend and spend record in his 1987 resignation letter from the Republican Party, moaning about “four giant Republican tax increases since 1981.”
