ABSTRACT
Reprised by every Republican president since Reagan, the formula is familiar: slash taxes, cut domestic programs, raise military spending, and deregulate. Reaganomics promised a tax cut-fueled utopia, with benefits “trickling down” to working people: soaring business investment would spur hiring and robust economic growth, while reduced taxes would allow Americans to keep more of their own money and replenish dwindling savings. Reagan was never forced to explain the contradiction of vilifying programs benefitting the poor while providing billions in tax breaks and subsidies for corporations. The Reagan “boom” was severely imbalanced, looking nothing like that of the postwar era and recalibrating the very definition of a strong economy. Of 16 million jobs created in the Reagan era, just over half paid poverty-level wages. From the Reagan era forward, most GOP politicians mocked environmentalists as “tree-hugging” job destroyers and laughably dismissed empirical evidence of a warming planet.
