Then, President George W. Bush and congressional Republicans began enacting tax cuts again.
Those tax cuts -- combined with Bush's two wars and the financial crisis caused, in large part, by inadequate federal regulation of Wall Street -- flooded the U.S. government ledgers with trillions of dollars in red ink.
So, the logical remedy would seem to be to combine some reasonable spending cuts with a surtax on millionaires and billionaires. There also could be huge savings if the United States shifted to a "Medicare-for-all" health system that eliminated the expensive private insurance middlemen.
But that would go against Reagan/Friedman dogma about giving virtually all power to corporations and trusting in the "magic of the market." Therefore, Ryan's "solution" is to savage domestic government spending, weaken government regulatory powers and pass more tax cuts for the wealthy.
Since he unveiled his budget plan this week, Ryan has been widely hailed by the mainstream U.S. news media as a "courageous" visionary, a thoughtful guy who is brave enough to make the tough choices.
In watching the correspondents on CNN and CNBC -- not to mention Fox -- it's almost as if the revenue side of the budget crisis is non-existent. "Political courage" only comes from destroying the remnants of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, if not Theodore Roosevelt's progressive era.
Why not repeal the entire 20th Century and take the nation back to an era of two Americas, a few living in the lap of luxury and most living hand-to-mouth?
Most media talking heads appear to be either devotees of free-market economist Milton Friedman or careerists who know that no one ever lost a promotion by promoting the anti-government doctrine of Ronald Reagan. (Reagan, of course, got his big start in politics in the 1960s by decrying Medicare as socialist oppression.)
The Cost of Reaganism
The American people are now paying the price for the lack of nearly any critical coverage of the Reagan presidency, as was apparent last February in the hagiography broadcast and written about the 40th president around the centennial of his birth.
The syrupy handling of Reagan and his legacy has had a powerful impact on the judgment of the American people. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans rated Reagan the greatest president ever, five percentage points ahead of Abraham Lincoln, who came in second.
When the Reagan mythology is combined with the powerful influence of the right-wing media, it shouldn't be a great surprise that many average Americans don't blame Reagan and his anti-government policies for why their incomes have stagnated or sunk over the past three decades.
Instead, many Americans, especially white men, have been encouraged to blame "guv-mint" and its supposed favoritism toward minorities and the poor. So, some don "revolutionary war" costumes and join Tea Party groups, which are often quietly funded by politically savvy billionaires.
Unlike the duped average guys, the billionaires -- the likes of the oil magnate Koch brothers and media mogul Rupert Murdoch -- are keenly attuned to their class interests. They know the only serious check on their extraordinary powers would be a democratized and energized federal government.
So, they invest in the faux populism of the Tea Party and Fox News to rile up the white guys with anti-government rage.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side, American progressives have tended to be ineffective in presenting a consistent or coherent message to the people.
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