Why Is Ronald Reagan Such A God To The Radical Right?

Whenever I get into a discussion with a conservative about tax policy, I mention two things: (1) Bill Clinton's 1993 budget -- which featured the biggest tax increase in modern U.S. history -- ushered in our country's greatest period of sustained economic expansion, and (2) Ronald Reagan signed into law the second biggest tax increase in modern U.S. History.

Let me repeat that last point: Ronald Freaking Reagan signed into law the second biggest tax increase in modern U.S. history:

It's conservative lore that Reagan the Icon cut taxes, while George H.W. Bush the Renegade raised them. As [former Reagan Budget Director David] Stockman recalls, "No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reagan's watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was." Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly--but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year's reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hike--the largest since World War II--was actually "tax reform" that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didn't count as raising taxes.)

Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives--and probably cost Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection--Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84.

What I find hilarious is that 99.99% of Republicans have no idea that Reagan raised taxes. The GOP clearly wants to keep this a secret, because if Republicans suddenly found out that Reagan was a chronic tax raiser, there would be mass suicides within the party, or, at the very least, an epidemic of spontaneous human combustion which would obliterate the GOP base.