Reagan raised taxes 11 times (from NPR last February):

[elocs]

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/04/133489113/Reagan-Legacy-Clouds-Tax-Record

Mr. GROVER NORQUIST (Americans for Tax Reform): We're spending too much, not taxing too little. It can be turned around. It was, in fact, when Reagan cut taxes. Tax hikes are what politicians do when they don't have the determination or the competence to govern.

HORSLEY: Reagan famously did cut taxes, sharply, in his first year in office. But as former Senator Alan Simpson, who co-chaired the fiscal commission, was quick to remind Norquist, that's only half the story.

Former Senator ALAN SIMPSON (Republican, Wyoming): Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration. I was here. I was here. I knew him. Better than anybody in this room. He was a dear friend and a total realist as to politics.

HORSLEY: Simpson's recollection is spot on, says historian Douglas Brinkley, the editor of Reagan's diaries.

I think that whenever I post a comment in my local paper or other places where Republicans like to congregate I will always add "Reagan raised taxes 11 times". Not that it will make much difference, but it's nice to be in their faces.

[handmade34]

1. Age of Greed

by Jeff Madrick... review by krugman

"...He recounts the economic turmoil of the 1970s, as the country was caught in the grip of stagflation. And as he points out, Nixon and Ford—like today’s Republicans—blamed the economy’s troubles not on the true culprits but on big government. Madrick stresses a key point that is often forgotten or misunderstood to this day: the surging inflation of the 1970s had its roots not in some general problem of “big government” but in largely temporary events—the oil price shock and disappointing crop yields—whose effects were magnified throughout the economy by wage-price indexation. Yet constant policy shifts by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve (remember wage-price controls?) under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, Madrick argues, made the American public lose faith in government effectiveness, creating within it a ready acceptance of the antigovernment messages of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan.

While we believe that there were deeper reasons for Reagan’s rise, Madrick is right that the economic malaise of the 1970s gave Reagan his big opening. As Madrick describes, Reagan’s enormous capacity for doublethink and convenient untruths enabled him, the front man for business interests, to convince a credulous public that “government had become the principal obstacle to their personal fulfillment.” In possibly the best chapter of the book, Madrick recounts the irony of how Reagan, the great moralizer, made unchecked greed and runaway individualism not only acceptable, but lauded, in the American psyche.

Madrick also does an especially persuasive job of demythologizing Milton Friedman, who provided intellectual heft for the antigovernment movement. As Madrick points out, although Friedman offered some important economic insights, he often shoehorned real-life data to fit into a one-sided narrative, gaining his theories wider acceptance than was ultimately justified. And Friedman, like Reagan, preferred “overly simple assertions of free market claims,” discarding the caveats..."


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/busts-keep-getting-bigger-why/?pagination=false