Will Bunch gets some precious space in the Washington Post to debunk five myths about Ronald Reagan, on the occasion of his 100th birthday. For example, Reagan didn’t shrink the size of government.
Reagan famously declared at his 1981 inauguration that “in the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This rhetorical flourish didn’t stop the 40th president from increasing the federal government’s size by every possible measure during his eight years in office.
Federal spending grew by an average of 2.5 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion. Many experts believe that Reagan’s massive deficits not only worsened the recession of the early 1990s but doomed his successor, George H.W. Bush, to a one-term presidency by forcing him to abandon his “no new taxes” pledge.
The number of federal employees grew from 2.8 million to 3 million under Reagan, in large part because of his buildup at the Pentagon. (It took the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton to trim the employee rolls back to 2.7 million.) Reagan also abandoned a campaign pledge to get rid of two Cabinet agencies – Energy and Education – and added a new one, Veterans Affairs.
I swear, when I read Bunch writing about Reagan, I can start thinking that he wasn’t that bad. He despised nuclear weapons, torture, killing innocents in anti-terror operations, and he raised taxes when reasonable people told him it was necessary. In other words, he would have no place in today’s GOP.
