NYT on Reagan's 100th

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2011/02/nyt-on-reagan-100th

The New York Times celebrates President Reagan's 100th birthday by publishing in its Sunday magazine an interview with a filmmaker who says of Reagan:

He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve. After all, Reaganomics set in motion one of the largest wealth redistributions in American history, away from the poor and toward the rich.

This doesn't even make any sense. If the poor are really poor, they don't have a large amount of "wealth" to redistribute to the rich. The Times doesn't ask the filmmaker for any facts to substantiate the claim. Presumably the reference is to Reagan's tax cuts, and the assumption seems somehow to be that the money the government was taking in taxes from "the rich" somehow belonged to the poor until the government let the "rich" keep more of what they earned, but that's quite an interpretive leap.

by Ira Stoll  |  Feb 5, 2011 at 10:31 pm Related Topics:  Income Inequality, Politics, Press, Taxes receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list