In the high-volume debate over taxes, facts about basic issues—who pays? how much? who doesn’t?—often get lost, twisted, or distorted. Perhaps the mo… - David Meyer Wessel

Panetta summed up Reaganomics in a single sentence: “A significant tax cut was enacted at the same time that defense spending went up and…entitlement programs were also expanding.”

From the mid-1930s to the 1970s, the government made a set of commitments that led to expectations on the part of the American people about what their government owes them," says Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "And they are totally unprepared to go back to a different world.

Reagan enjoyed many victories as president. But starving the beast was not one of them. When he left office, federal spending was 20 percent higher, adjusted for inflation, than it had been when he arrived, and he never found a way to pay for it. In the twenty years before Reagan became president—under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter—the budget deficit averaged well under 1 percent of GDP. In Reagan’s eight years, it averaged 4.25 percent of GDP.