The Truth: Ronald Reagan Did Not Cut Taxes

Murray Rothbard had it right decades ago when he wrote:

 Reagan is by far the biggest spender in American history. He is also the biggest taxer. Taxes were never cut.

Now the Keynesian former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, admits as much:

 [N]ational economic council chairman Gary Cohn... said “Look, tax cuts are really important to me. I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We haven’t done tax cuts in 31 years. So, to be a part of an administration that gets something done that hasn’t been done for 31 years is enormously challenging, enormously interesting to me.”

The problem with this statement is how utterly wrong it is. Taxes were not cut 31 years ago. A central point of the 1986 Tax Reform Act was that it was revenue neutral.

The same is likely to occur under Trump. It will be mostly just a shifting of the point of taxation.

-RW