What Would Reagan Do?

Bruce Bartlett takes a look at the Post-Depression history of Republicans and taxes.  I really liked this part:

Republican Ronald Reagan supported taxing capital gains as ordinary income – they are now taxed much less – and supported higher taxes on corporations. Defending his tax reform proposal in 1985, Reagan said:

We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that have allowed some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary, and that's crazy. It's time we stopped it….

What we're trying to move against is institutionalized unfairness. We want to see that everyone pays their fair share, and no one gets a free ride. Our reasons? It's good for society when we all know that no one is manipulating the system to their advantage because they're rich and powerful. But it's also good for society when everyone pays something, that everyone makes a contribution.

It’s hard to imagine a Republican speaking those words today. Conservatives insist that the rich are, in fact, overtaxed and have suffered more from the recession than any other group. In an October 6 blog post, Tax Foundation president Scott Hodge lamented that the overall income of millionaires has fallen 50 percent since 2007. I’m sure the unemployed will find this comforting.

That reminded me of this interview a few days ago:

NEARY: All right, so we have two political parties using this whole idea of job creation in two very different ways. We have the Republicans talking about don't hurt the businesses; don't hurt the job creators. Is that also a fallacy?
FREZZA: Well, notice the grammar. They're worried about job creators. They're not worried about job creation. Let's think about job creators. What are those people's lives like right now? Well, they're all making more than $250,000 a year, whether they're running a small business or they're an executive in a company, and they've been declared public enemy number one.
They've been told their taxes have to go up. They're the one that bear the brunt of the regulatory compliance costs. So they've been whipping boy, now, for a couple years - lumped in, by the way, with the hedge fund moguls and the criminals on Wall Street. All have been put in one, big pie and told that they're the problem. Why would those people run out and try to risk their businesses by hiring more?
NEARY: You really think of business owners as whipping boys, and even those who are making big profits, as whipping boys?
FREZZA: Yeah, I would absolutely say that the businessmen in the culture today have become whipping boys. We've seen this before. It happened during the Great Depression, and we had the same result last time.

I'm tired of businesspeople whining about being picked on.  They are doing better than anybody else, they ought to quit pouting.  The man says it clearly, businesses only hire because they have to.  Any government policies ought to be targeted at consumers who create demand, not giving tax cuts to businessmen.