Reagan Placed a Higher Tax Burden on Americans Than Obama

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein recently refuted the Republican/Tea Party touchstone that Obama has placed a higher tax burden on Americans than other presidents. Klein shows you have only to look to Ronald Reagan for evidence.

Today’s problems, Klein says, are radically different from Reagan’s era, and they began under Clinton, who allowed the crumbling of the wall between insured and uninsured investing and the deregulation of the mortgage industry, and were exacerbated under Bush II, who continued deregulation and used deficit spending to finance tax cuts for the rich and the war he declared in Iraq.

Contrary to popular belief, taxes are lower under Obama than they were under Reagan. In 1983, when Reagan was trying to get the economy out of recession, revenues were 17.5 percent of GDP. In 2010, when Obama was trying to guide the economy into a recovery, revenues were 14.9 percent of GDP.

Taxes are so low under Obama in large part because of the Bush tax cuts and the effects of the financial crisis. But they’re also low because of the tax cuts passed by Obama in the stimulus bill.

Klein adds that the long-term outlook under the Obama plan is good.

In 1988, when Reagan left office, revenues were 18.2 percent of GDP. Under the Congressional Budget Office’s alternative-fiscal scenario — which is their most realistic projection — revenues only rise to 18.4 percent of GDP by 2021. If Obama manages to pass his most consistent tax-policy demand and sunset the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000, that would rise by less than half a percentage point. In other words, taxes were never as low under Reagan as they are under Obama, and Obama’s policies would not lead to a significantly different tax burden than Reagan’s policies did.

Finally, Klein notes that Obama isn’t done yet so while we can definitively rate Reagan’s initiatives, Obama’s are a work in progress.

GOP Should Just Sit Out 2012

Watching the Republican Party struggling to agree on a presidential candidate, one wonders whether the G.O.P. shouldn’t just sit this election out — just give 2012 a pass…. You know how in Scrabble sometimes you look at your seven letters and you’ve got only vowels that spell nothing? What do you do? You go back to the pile. You throw your letters back and hope to pick up better ones to work with. That’s what Republican primary voters seem to be doing. They just keep going back to the pile but still coming up with only vowels that spell nothing.

— Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times.

Romney a ‘Puff of Presidential-Looking Air’

It’s hard to find a single Republican, including those most solidly behind him, who demonstrates true passion for him or can do even a persuasive pantomime of it. They call him effective, not inspirational. They praise his competence, not his charisma. He doesn’t exert any sort of gravitational pull on his party. There’s no full swoon…. Almost all of the presidents elected over recent decades have been propelled by pockets of intense enthusiasm, which can paper over so many specific political predicaments and eclipse tensions with the base. They were saviors before they were disappointments, not disappointments right out of the gate. And almost all of them had something solid — a resonant personal story or an outsize personality or a bold vision — for admirers to latch onto. Romney wafts through a voter’s fingers, a puff of presidential-looking air.

— Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times.