True. Because congress convenes from Jan. 3 that one ended three weeks before the president was seated. My apologies.

To your point, rather than debate the accuracy of one citation based on the inaccuracy of another, why don’t you actually bother to check the other citations? The sources are provided, so you don’t even need to waste any valuable time using a search engine. If you find them in error because they are incorrect, that’s a good reason to reject them. Rejecting them without examination because something else Julian Cate said was not correct is a logical fallacy. Feel free to fact-check the data I posted as well. You should believe those facts because they are, uh, facts. If you could take the time to look up the Senate makeup from 1980 through 1987, something tells me you probably already did check out the other facts and can’t make an argument against them, so you would rather ignore the facts on the grounds that the person who posted them is not credible. Which would make perfect sense if the facts had been generated by the person who cited them, and not the sources that the citations came from. That not being the case, again, that brings us to a logical fallacy.

Your opinion of the Reagan presidency is illogical, and frankly stupid, in light of actual history and not the history that apparently happened exclusively in your mind. To address your “argument” any further would be futile and redundant. If overseeing a larger than expected military budget and granting amnesty to 3 million illegal aliens (with the false promise of better security to follow), weighed against cutting taxes, reducing spending, supporting economic policies that controlled inflation and reversed economic stagnation, deregulating industries that had been socialized or nearly socialized for decades, easing restrictions and regulations on business and banking, halving the federal register, to name just major issues – if that constitutes “governing from the center”, then I’d agree that Reagan “governed from the center”. Those are positions taken predominantly by the right though, and despised virulently by the left (as evidenced by the fact that the exact opposite positions were held by the Democratic president Reagan replaced), so if I had to choose a term to describe them, I’d tend to lean more towards “Right/Conservative” than “Center/Liberal”. But hey, that’s me. And since John McCain supports all those same positions, I guess I’d call him a “conservative” too. Why, wait a minute, John McCain doesn’t support those positions at all. Silly me.

’79-’81 was when Carter was president. I demonstrated my claim that the Senate was not always controlled by the Democrats, rather it was controlled by the Republicans for six of the eight Reagan years. Julian directly contradicted me. I provided evidence to show that Julian was wrong. Given Julian’s track record on something that simple, why should I give credence to the rest.

Reagan talked a good game, but he governed from the middle (except for his massive deficits). The hard-line conservatives in the Republican Party would object to him because he was far too much like Giuliani, McCain and Romney.

I like that your only retort after your entire original argument has broken down is to nitpick a 5 seat majority in one house of Congress. Conveniently missing, too, are the ’79-81 Senate makeup, which was majority-Democrat by 17 seats, and the ’87-’89, which was majority-Democrat by 10 seats. Reagan took office in 1981 and left in 1989, so those still “count”.

The argument you were making is pretty secondary anyway. The only part really relevant to the article is that Reagan didn’t run on a centrist, or leftist, platform and abandon conservative principles to get elected, as you assert. He was not a John McCain by any stretch of the imagination. Compromise to achieve one’s goals is understandable and sometimes necessary. Having the same goals as the opposition, compromising conservative principles, and not gaining anything from it is not acceptable.

Is the rest of your research as reliable?

Several factual errors…

Of the eight years Reagan was President, he submitted a BALANCED budget to the Congress for six of those years. It was the Democrats in Congress who were solely responsible for there being a deficit during those six years.

Reagan never had a Republican majority in the Senate, only a very narrow margin in the House from 1981-1983. The rest of his Presidency was hamstrung by divided government with Democrats controlling the legislature.

From the Congressional Budget Office’s website:

Total federal tax receipts in 1981 were: $599 Billion
Total federal tax receipts in 1989 were: $991 Billion

While Reagonomics did indeed center on the Laffer curve, the real effect of tax cutting and wringing inflation from the economy was that the aggregate demand curve for that period shifted vertically downward and a bit left, while the aggregate movement of the supply curve was significantly to the right. Effect? Commodity prices fell, real earnings increased by about $4,000 per household, (that’s after adjusting for CPIs and inflation), productivity soared.

From the Federal Reserve website and in 2000 dollars,

Real GDP for 1981: $5.3 Trillion
Real GDP for 1989: $7 Trillion

You can scoff all you like at “voodoo economics” but the numbers don’t lie.

Phil;

Yes, you’re not calling us misfits, just saying that we’ve lost our senses and that we don’t really care about Supreme Court nominations. You’re also mistaken about the rejection of McCain being personal rather than ideological. Everything I’ve read on various blogs iterates and reiterates the ideological basis for disliking McCain.

Lisa;

As Patrick pointed out, there is not equivalency between Reagan’s willingness to compromise in order to get conservative initiatives enacted, and McCain’s willingness to forgo conservative initiatives altogether in order to enact liberal ones.

Francis Schaeffer once wrote, ” It doesn’t matter whether you elect a right wing Humanist, or a left wing Humanist, you end up with a Humanist”. Substitute the word “Liberal” for “Humanist” and you’ve caught the essence of voting for McCain. In short, the difference between McCain and a Democrat would be marginal – a matter of style points.

Regards.

That’s actually a very valid assumption given the previous years of history and the economic situation the United States was in. Reducing the 12% inflation that existed at the time required squeezing the money supply, which (necessarily) caused the recession of the early 80′s. Recession plus increased taxes (or even stable taxes at the late 70′s rates) equals… stagnation. At best. Or worse recession. Increasing tax rates during a recession was the brainchild of FDR and his Keynsian brain trust, and resulted in the Great Depression. Generally not viewed as a favorable economic policy.

If you actually understood what the Laffer curve and the accompanying theory represent, and not just the 30 second sound bites you heard on the Today show 20 years ago, you probably wouldn’t consider reducing a 70% individual tax rate “Voodoo Economics”. That the Laffer curve/theory exists is undisputed by economists. The only dispute is at what level increased tax rates result in diminishing returns – it’s generally thought, even by the most Keynsian economists, to be around 60%. And again, the spending increase rate, even taking into consideration the large increase in defense spending, was reduced during the Reagan administration. Running temporary defecits to finance a wartime run up in defense spending is often necessary, and usually more favorable in the long run than hiking taxes (especially when they’re at especially high levels – like 70%) and applying more brakes to the economy.

In any case, regardless of your opinion of the Reagan presidency, to say that he was a pseudo-conservative analogous to John McCain is absurd. I don’t agree with everything he did in office, but I’d hardly call him a RINO. Like I said, compromising once you’re in office in order to achieve conservative ideological goals is one thing. That’s practical politics. Being ideologically at odds with your party and siding with the opposite party BEFORE you get into office isn’t a compromise – you haven’t traded anything, and haven’t gained anything for your “side”. That is McCain.

The economic activity generated by reducing tax RATES during the Reagan administration actually increased tax REVENUES.

You assume that there would have been no growth in the economy without tax cuts. That is not a valid assumption. You need to compare actual revenues with expected revenues. Reagan cut taxes and never made up for it with Laffer’s Voodoo Economics.