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Article: Seeking insolvency: the strange career of supply-side economics.
- Article from:
- World Policy Journal
- Article date:
- June 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 World Policy Institute. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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For almost a generation, American politics have been consumed by issues of insolvency. Soon after the passage of the tax cut advocated by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and the almost immediate explosion of the federal deficit, senior decisionmakers in the Reagan administration grasped that they had created a mechanism for controlling policy choices and limiting the political debate. The deficit had created a spiraling effect: a general paralysis of social policy, which in turn accelerated public cynicism about the capacities of government. In this peculiar era, those who sought to restore solvency and public trust had to fight against the current. When President Bush signed a tax ...