While conservatives today celebrate Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday as a moment to recall the achievements of Reagan's presidency, one part of the Reagan myth, that he was a fiscal conservative who helped show the USA the road to prosperity through a leaner government, isn't supported by the facts.
Instead, history shows that Ronald Reagan reversed a long trend of reducing the national debt as a percentage of GDP, which had been lowered by every previous president (except Gerald Ford) since the end of World War II.
Ronald Reagan exploded the federal debt, eventually to over a trillion dollars, by cutting taxes while demanding that the nation fund a huge expansion of the military. Even the Wall Street Journal at the time was aware of the unsound nature of this Republican deficit-spending scheme. They and other newspapers warned of the "baleful effects of big
deficits."
Reagan was hopeful that the deficits would frighten the American people into supporting a wide-ranging series of cuts in social spending, not military spending, and while some cuts were made in welfare programs, which increased the suffering of the poor, the debt as a percentage of GDP ballooned under Reagan and George H. W. Bush (Bush I) back to a point it had been at under another Republican, Dwight Eisenhower.
It was finally during the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton that some progress was made in reducing the debt, and in obtaining budget surpluses for the first time in many years. That progress was wiped out by the deficit spending of Republican George W. Bush (Bush II), who again initiated a huge increase in spending for military and national security programs, but who lowered taxes, and encouraged a false sense of prosperity, through a temporary and extremely costly binge of deficit consumer spending.
http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-national/ronald-reagan-began-us-government-deficit-spending-addiction
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