Fareed Zakaria: The Republican Revolution: Real This Time?
[Fareed Zakaria is Editor at Large for Time magazine.]
We are watching the third Republican revolution unfold — the third time the Republican Party has come to power promising to fundamentally alter the relationship of the U.S. government to society. If the past is any guide, the Republicans are going to have a tough time fulfilling their pledge. If they do not deliver yet again, the American people, at some point, will surely conclude that they are hypocrites.
The first Republican revolution was the Reagan one, which promised to roll back Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. In its place, Reagan proposed a low-tax, small-government America. The first part happened, with a historic reform of the tax codes, bringing marginal tax rates way down and eliminating hundreds of loopholes. But the spending cuts never took place. The result: from 1981 to 1985, the federal budget deficit more than doubled as a percentage of GDP, and it declined slightly in Reagan's second term only because he agreed to tax increases. Still, the basic pattern was set. If the old Democratic paradigm was tax and spend, the new Republican one was borrow and spend....
Read entire article at Time.com
We are watching the third Republican revolution unfold — the third time the Republican Party has come to power promising to fundamentally alter the relationship of the U.S. government to society. If the past is any guide, the Republicans are going to have a tough time fulfilling their pledge. If they do not deliver yet again, the American people, at some point, will surely conclude that they are hypocrites.
The first Republican revolution was the Reagan one, which promised to roll back Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. In its place, Reagan proposed a low-tax, small-government America. The first part happened, with a historic reform of the tax codes, bringing marginal tax rates way down and eliminating hundreds of loopholes. But the spending cuts never took place. The result: from 1981 to 1985, the federal budget deficit more than doubled as a percentage of GDP, and it declined slightly in Reagan's second term only because he agreed to tax increases. Still, the basic pattern was set. If the old Democratic paradigm was tax and spend, the new Republican one was borrow and spend....