Reagonomics: What the GOP Presidential Contenders are not saying. (It has taken away from the middle class.)

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/what-trump-cruz-and-gop-field-wont-tell-you-about-reaganomics?akid=13912.294211.FmYPoo&rd=1&src=newsletter1049496&t=4

Ronald Reagan is quite the opposite of a boon for the low-tax, low-regulation argument: he was actually responsible for a historically large tax increase.

The historical evidence is clear, and with economists actively warning against the Republican economic plans that “deny fiscal reality,” “benefit the wealthiest Americans” and “ensure that the top 1 percent comes out way ahead,” there is absolutely no reason for Americans to be caught in a debate over which Party has the better economic policy.

The Republican laissez-faire, supply-side economic agenda doesn’t work. 

Politicians have sliced taxes and gashed regulation (although thanks to the Obama administration this has slightly waned); the economy has undergone the worst recession in recent history; taxes on the wealthy have been slashed, loopholes preserved and the Bush tax cuts made permanent; regulations have been destroyed, in part because of the worldview of Alan Greenspan, who has personally admitted to being wrong (Dodd Frank doesn’t go far enough to rein in the greed); wealth is again soaring to the top 1%; the Republicans are again in control of Congress, and, even they don’t have the presidency as they did in the 1920s, they are stopping the current one from signing progressive tax legislation into law.

America got it right a few decades ago. As economist Thomas Piketty explains, the “progressive taxation of very high incomes and very large estates partly explains why the concentration of wealth never regained its astronomic Belle Époque levels after the shocks of 1914-1945.”