Let's look at some more charts.
All while cutting income tax rates from 70% to 28%, corporate tax rates from 46% to 34%, and ending the Cold War. Reagan proved that you could cut taxes while increasing revenues. Sure, his spending increased along with it but the majority of the budget was spent on defense. Sounds like a conservative's wet dream to me :lol:
This is exactly it. Let's divorce, for a moment, government spending and defense spending, the same way liberals like to divorce government spending and entitlement spending.
If you look at government spending devoid of defense, Reagan was a great budget hawk who helped lower taxes, raise revenues, and lower spending. The problem was this teensy tinsy neighbor called the USSR. Reagan, in order to protect Americans and bring down the Soviet Union, dramatically increased defense spending to both modernize our weaponry, and develop beyond the Soviets. At that time, many forget, the USSR had more advanced weaponry, including a larger and more advanced supply of nukes, than we did. By supporting anti-socialist governments around the world, we hoped to roll back the Soviet influence and break down the Soviet Union. Guess what? We succeeded.
Now, what Reagan did wasn't all good. Obviously, some of our anti-socialist allies around the world have turned into a thorn in our sides, and I for one regret the decisions to topple those pro-Soviet regimes.
Also, our defense spending bubble, while necessary under the Reagan Doctrine, has long been obsolete. We have the most advanced military in the world, bar none, and with our squadron of F22s alone we could maintain air superiority over the entire planet. And that's not an exaggeration. Obviously, we need to be able to update our military to reflect the growing changes and older hardware we currently use. But that does not mean we have to spend over half a trillion dollars on defense. Even in the post 9/11 world, a bigger bomb or a faster jet isn't going to do us much good against terrorists.
