The truth about Ronnie

Taxes: What people forget about Reagan - Sep. 8, 2010:

Two bills passed in 1982 and 1984 together "constituted the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime," Thorndike said. The bills didn't raise more revenue by hiking individual income tax rates though. Instead they did it largely through making it tougher to evade taxes, and through "base broadening" -- that is, reducing various federal tax breaks and closing tax loopholes.

One of the things that bothers me most about the media, and by extension the political parties, is their constant misappropriation of the truth. The myth of Ronald Reagan has been spread far and wide by many on the right as they issue a call for a return to the "morning in America" ideal pushed so effectively during Reagan's re-election campaign in 1984. Unfortunately (as Will Bunch chronicled in his book Tear Down This Myth), the real truth about the Gipper lends far less credence to the calls from right-wing pundits.

Ronald Reagan presided over a remarkably significant period in American history, a time that many view with great nostalgia. However, as a wise man once said, "those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it..." and more to the point, those who are not taught history cannot learn from it.