I watched with great interest what Reagan had put forth. His agreement with Congress was to cut taxes and curtail spending, except for an increase in military spending (which eventually ran the Soviet Empire into the ground in an effort to keep up). This was done in conjunction with putting an end to government-induced inflation via action by the Federal Reserve. Speaker of the House T. O'Neill renegged on the spending cuts once the revenues began pouring into government coffers in about 1983. His big stick was to deny Reagan the military money unless he agreed to the huge social spending budgets that O'Neill put out of the House.
The big tax cuts were in personal income tax, investment taxes, and business taxes. This fueled the greatest economic expansion in world history. We are still in it. We have had one recession during that time, which was due to the First Gulf War and Bush I renegging on his "no new taxes" pledge and raising taxes. Bingo...recession, but it lasted only a few months. We are not in a recession at this time.
