Peggy Noonan’s outstanding WSJ column this weekend contrasts the final days of the Reagan presidency versus the final days of Biden’s time in office.
PLEASE take a few minutes to watch this clip of Reagan’s final and masterful press conference on December 8, 1988. In stark contrast to Biden’s rambling gibberish and disappearance from the stage, an aging Reagan was still lucid and in command of the facts.
In this clip, Reagan explains beautifully to UPI’s Helen Thomas how his famous tax cuts did NOT cause the deficit problem.
HELEN THOMAS: The world is applauding the initiative, the new detente, that you and President Gorbachev have initiated. But on the debit side, as you leave office, the Nation is saddled with a $2.6 billion debt, an enormous deficit, caused perhaps by the tripling of military spending, tax cuts. How does all this jibe with the goals that you set 8 years ago?…
REAGAN: Helen, I have to tell you it is incorrect to say that all of this happened because we cut taxes and the things that have happened in these last few years. I’ve said many times, and pointed out, that over 58 years in which the opposing party held the House of Representatives — 54 of those 58 years — and in those years there were only 8 scattered years in which there was a balanced budget…
Now, beginning in 1965, in the middle sixties, when President Johnson’s program of the War on Poverty was put in place — in the 15 years from then until 1980, the budget increased just about 5 times what it had been 15 years before. And the deficit increased to 58 times what it had been. So, we came in inheriting literally deficit spending built into the structure of government.
Now, with regard to the tax cuts — yes, the rates were cut. But since 1981 our revenue from those taxes has increased by $375 billion, and our projection — and we’ve been very accurate on our projections — our projection for 1990, in the budget we’re working on now, calls for another $80 billion increase in our revenues with the rates as they presently are.
If you look back beyond us to Coolidge and his tax cuts, if you look to the Kennedy tax cut in his administration — which was very similar to the one that we later put in — in every case, it did not reduce the Government revenues; it raised them. So, it is maintaining this and continuing to get back to a reduced spending, because while the revenue was increasing $375 billion, the spending increase was close to $100 billion more than that increase in revenues.