McCain: I'll Cut Deficits Like Reagan

"When Senator John McCain was asked how he plans to balance the budget, he said that he hoped to do so by stimulating economic growth - and approvingly cited the example of President Ronald Reagan," the New York Times reports.
"There was one thing he did not mention during his response: the deficit nearly tripled during the Reagan presidency, partly due to tax cuts and increases in military spending."



During his 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan promised to balance the federal budget. In an effort to balance the budget, Reagan cut in virtually every department of government. He cut back social programs and payments for people with disabilities and cut funding of school-lunch programs. Regan started a massive military buildup, Pentagon spending would reach $34 million an hour during his administration.

When, in August 1981, Reagan signed his Recovery Act into law at Rancho del Cielo, his Santa Barbara ranch, he promised to find additional cuts to balance the budget, which had a projected deficit of $80 billion - the largest, to that date, in U.S. history.
By November 1982, unemployment reached, nine million, the highest rate since the Depression; 17,000 businesses failed, the second highest number since 1933; farmers lost their land; and many sick, elderly, and poor became homeless.

The country lived through the recession for a full year before Reagan finally admitted publicly that the economy was in trouble. His budget cuts, which hurt the poor, and his tax cuts, which favored the rich, combined with the hardships of a recession, spawned the belief that Reagan was insensitive to his people's needs.

By the end of his terms Ronald Reagan not only didn't balance the federal budget but now the nation's debt was larger than all the debt accumulated by all the presidents before him combined.

From 1983 through 1985, with a Republican Senate, the debt was increasing at over 17% per year. While Mr. Reagan was in office this nation’s debt went from just under 1 trillion dollars to over 2.6 trillion dollars, a 200% increase. The sad part about this increase is that it was not to educate our children, or to improve our infrastructure, or to help the poor, or even to finance a war. Reagan’s enormous increase in the national debt was not to pay for any noble cause at all; his primary unapologetic goal was to pad the pockets of the rich.