The news has been filled with Reagan retrospectives, some of which are sheer hagiography, others which are quite good and even-handed. I don’t have too much to add, especially as I was fairly young during Reagan’s presidency, and in many ways I come to him both as historical figure and as symbol.
But I do wish to point to William Keegan’s piece in the Guardian article arguing that Reaganomics - the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves - has been one of the most lasting and damaging legacies of the president.
There was a fundamental flaw at the heart of Reagonomics, namely the idea - epitomised by the famous Laffer Curve - that tax cuts would pay for themselves via greater incentives.
The truth was that the supply side doctrine was a crude and intellectually shabby attempt to justify tax cuts for the rich. For those with incomes above $250,000 (£135,879) a year, taxes as a percentage of income came down from 48.6% to 38.9% between 1980 and 1984.
Actually, this legacy is twofold. One is sheerly political - what I suspect is the lesson Dick Cheney found when he said Reagan “proved deficits don’t matter”. The Reagan Revolution (shrinking the size of government) ran up against the popularity of government functions like defense spending and infrastructure and social security. Much like a married couple in which one spouse pretends the other is not spending money as long as it goes on the credit card instead of out of her/his checking account, the ideological GOP base was able to keep up the illusion of a small-government party, while the Republicans didn’t have to penny-pinch their way out of office. And of course, the base itself could be blind to the true costs of a hefty defense program or of interest on national debt. Nonetheless, deficits didn’t matter politically as long as mutual ignorance could be maintained.
The other legacy, which I find more disturbing frankly, is the beginning of anti-scientism of the Republican party. From Eisenhower through Nixon and Carter, there was generally bi-partisan concensus on the value of professional macroeconomic policy. The parties differed in their priorities and emphasis, but it wasn’t until the Reagan Revolution that sham economics of the Supply Siders discarded academic work and set up parallel and competing policy institutions whose sole purpose was to provide intellectual gloss to an intellectually bankrupt philosophy. On one hand, their economic heterodoxy still exerts an influence on the economic policy of the Bush administration, who has created the weird hybrid of Supply-side Keynesianism to sell its tax cuts. As Kevin Drum points out, the Texas GOP still pines for the gold standard. On the other hand, the gambit of heterodox science has spread beyond economics to every imaginable realm in which the Republicans don’t want to acknowledge bad news or wish to tilt policy in industry’s favor: the environment, air quality, food and drug regulation, health research, disease contol, teen pregnancy, what have you. As Chris Mooney, whose blog documents such “conservative Lysenkoism”, puts it,
Reagan’s scientific legacy isn’t a particularly good one. It includes, for example, his 1980 campaign endorsement of creationism, as well as his refusal to speak out about the AIDS epidemic as the death toll continued to mount. In these respects Reagan was the first Republican president to cater to the newly powerful religious right on matters of science, a very troubling legacy in my opinion. Subsequent Republican leaders–Gingrich and Bush, principally–may have gone farther in this direction than Reagan ever did, but Reagan started the trend. Indeed, that he’s now being spoken of as a possible posthumous champion of stem cell research is highly ironic: Reagan put in place a ban on fetal tissue transplantation research not unlike W.’s almost-ban on stem cell research.
Such examples are indeed harbingers of the GOP-dominated House of Representatives’ and the Bush administration’s fondness of scientific heterodoxy. But I would argue that without the model forged by the supply-siders - policy institutions making prestige claims in mimicry of bona fide academic institutitions - these specific instances of anti-scientific stances wouldn’t have coalesced into full-blooded challenges to proper science.
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