Word: reaganism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rest is bloody and familiar history. Goldwater won the nomination (after a nominating speech by political newcomer Ronald Reagan) and ran, forthrightly, as Goldwater. He proposed to make Social Security voluntary and eliminate farm subsidies, positions his party would not dare to suggest again seriously for almost three decades. He supported giving nato field commanders the authority to launch nuclear weapons. On Election Day, Goldwater was crushed, getting just 39% of the vote. The G.O.P. lost two seats in the Senate, 37 in the House. It was a sign of Bob Dole's popularity in his district that he managed...
Whatever else it was, the Reagan Revolution was indeed a 180 degrees turn in the party's views of deficit spending. For more than a century the G.O.P. had been the party of balanced budgets. Goldwater actually opposed Kennedy's 1963 tax cut on the grounds that spending cuts had to come first. But the constant warnings against deficits, and the corresponding insistence that popular but costly programs had to be cut, had also made the G.O.P. a party of bitter medicine. Democrats could promise more sugar at every election year. By the late 1970s the G.O.P. was asking itself...
...wages would explode like popcorn, from which higher tax revenues would follow, despite the lower rates. In no time, the supply-side theory went from being a disputed intellectual curiosity to being the unofficial doctrine of the party. It made possible a new, infinitely optimistic Republicanism, one that permitted Reagan to promise lower taxes without reductions in the most beloved federal benefits, like Social Security and Medicare. Popular programs at popular prices. Attention, K-mart voters...
...Kemp-Roth cut approved in the first year of Reagan's presidency failed to produce revenue in anything like the amounts the theorists had projected. Meanwhile, throughout the Reagan years, though discretionary spending dropped by more than a third, not a single major federal spending program was eliminated. Republicans were still unwilling to embrace Goldwater's frank and fatally unpopular rejection of the big-budget entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. (When the G.O.P. Congress made a feint at Medicare last year, its approval rating plummeted.) The predictable result was a massive increase in the federal deficit, $1.5 trillion over...
...remember the chaos of picking a running mate at the very last minute: Adlai Stevenson in 1956 throwing the decision open to the convention, with the multiballot fight between John Kennedy, Estes Kefauver and Al Gore Sr. And the night in 1980 when we waited for Reagan to announce that he had chosen former President Ford, only to learn that the deal had collapsed at the last minute...