Ronnie Must Be Turnin' Cartwheels In His Grave...

in his grave...I guess he's no longer the hero of the Republican Party.

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With the nation at risk of default next month, the Republicans’ fierce anti-tax orthodoxy is running square into the Ghost of the Gipper— the GOP’s great modern, pre-tea party hero, Ronald Reagan.

Indeed, a POLITICO review of Reagan’s own budget documents shows that the Republican president repeatedly signed deficit-reduction legislation in the 1980’s that melded annual tax increases with spending cuts just as President Barack Obama is now asking Congress to consider.

The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA) is the most famous, because of its historic size and timing, a dramatic course correction that quickly followed Reagan’s signature income tax cuts in 1981. But in the six years after were four more deficit-reduction acts, which combined to almost double TEFRA’s revenue impact on an annual basis.

A table in one of Reagan’s final budget submissions spells this out.

For 1991, the document projects $61.6 billion in revenue increases attributed to TEFRA. At the same time, the four other smaller deficit-reduction acts were expected to add a total of $53 billion in revenues on an annual basis.

Translated into current dollars, the total revenue increases for the five bills would then be equal to about $190 billion a year. That’s far in excess of anything that has been proposed by the White House in recent deficit talks led by Vice President Joseph Biden, yet most of these increases were approved when Republicans controlled the Senate in the 1980’s.

The contrast with today’s politics is striking.

The administration is still hoping that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will see the potential of a large deficit-reduction deal that would include revenues but be more heavily tilted toward spending reductions over the next 10 years. Yet Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—who came to Congress in the midst of the Reagan administration—is unyielding and time is running out given the Treasury’s early August deadline for action on raising the federal debt ceiling.