{"id":21189,"date":"2011-07-22T06:30:42","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T11:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=21189"},"modified":"2011-07-22T09:54:37","modified_gmt":"2011-07-22T14:54:37","slug":"chanting-points-memo-reagan-was-a-moderate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=21189","title":{"rendered":"Chanting Points Memo:  &#8220;Reagan Was A Moderate!&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two things that make me think &#8220;something&#8217;s just not right here&#8221;, and warrant some investigation:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?cat=108\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-21243\" title=\"chanting_points_200px\" src=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/chanting_points_200px.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"152\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Teenagers asking &#8220;so, are you going out Friday night?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Liberals citing Reagan.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Lately, there&#8217;s been a plague of liberals, in print\/blogs\/on Twitter, stating without fear of contradiction (because, if you&#8217;re a Twin Cities liberal, nobody has <em>ever <\/em>contradicted you) that &#8220;today&#8217;s conservatives would never nominate Ronald Reagan&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a claim based on two dubious premises:<\/p>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>Reagan wasn&#8217;t especially tough on abortion<\/li>\n<li>The claim that &#8220;Reagan raised taxes&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=20979\">dispensed with the second point last week<\/a>; leaving aside that the &#8220;Reagan tax hikes&#8221; were entirely a result of Reagan keeping up his end of a bargain and the Democrats welching on theirs, Reagan&#8217;s tax cuts were 50% bigger, in terms of percent of the budget, than his tax hikes. \u00a0The fact that the hikes accounted for in absolute dollars than in percentage in fact proves the <em>conservative <\/em>point; Reagan&#8217;s tax cuts contributed to the economy reversing from the Carter era malaise to the mid-eighties boom &#8211; a boom that could absorb some hikes (whether it was a wise idea or not) &#8211; certainly better than it could have in the middle of a recession.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>As to the abortion issue &#8211; that, again,shows how little the left understands the Tea Party. \u00a0Abortion is a key conservative issue &#8211; but when the economy is in the tank, it&#8217;s not the <em>most <\/em>important issue facing the Chief Executive. \u00a0As Reagan allocated political capital among his key priorities &#8211; the economy, defeating communism &#8211; his metaphorical &#8220;abortion&#8221; budget was squeezed down to &#8220;using the bully pulpit against the practice&#8221;&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;which is pretty much where today&#8217;s Tea Partiers are with the issue; mortally opposed, but focused on other things at the moment.<\/p>\n<p>The lesson? \u00a0As your liberal friends start parrotting these memes, by all means set &#8217;em straight.<\/p>\n<p>(Closed-circuit to liberal commenters: Go ahead. \u00a0Point out that &#8220;Reagan legalized abortion in California&#8221;. \u00a0I dare you)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two things that make me think &#8220;something&#8217;s just not right here&#8221;, and warrant some investigation: Teenagers asking &#8220;so, are you going out Friday night?&#8221; Liberals citing Reagan. Lately, there&#8217;s been a plague of liberals, in print\/blogs\/on Twitter, stating without fear of contradiction (because, if you&#8217;re a Twin Cities liberal, nobody has ever contradicted you) that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,16,25,123,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chanting-points-memo","category-conservatism","category-history-and-its-making","category-taxes","category-the-great-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21189"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21242,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21189\/revisions\/21242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}