One of my guilty pleasures is listening to Hate Radio during drivetime (and being stuck in the Chicago area, that’s a lot of time for remarkably short distances). In theory, I should be laughing equally at the remarkable stupidity of both brands of Hate Radio, but I have to admit that, at least here, Team Red seems to field radio hosts that are… well…. dull. The Team Blue Hate Radio is funnier, much less focus on the personality cult of the host and much more actual unhinged ranting.

In any case, the Team Blue Hate Radio guy in the morning seems to obsess a lot about Ronald Reagan and Reaganomics, especially how this drives today’s events. Now, despite the fact that Reagan left office almost 30 years ago, apparently everything, EVERYTHING, that’s wrong with our economy devolves back to him and his policies, the Universal Cause. Apparently, he destroyed the middle class through tax cuts, slashes in government spending, reduction of government size, and dramatic scaling back of entitlements. Lots of dark references to “trickle down” and “gutting of social programs to put money in the pockets of the wealthy.”

On the flip side, Reagan has been all but canonized by Team Red for all these same reasons- the man who slew the dragon of big government and reified the conservatism of forebears like Barry Goldwater. One would think that this should make him into a hero for libertarians: let us conveniently forget the ramping of the Drug War, the institution of urine collection, the expansion of the carceral state, the prosecution of media dealing with sex- all can be forgiven because of the economics, right? Team Red Hate Radio may be boring, but they never miss an opportunity to long for the fiscally conservative days of the pre-Alzheimer’s Gipper.

Since both Teams and their respective Hate Radio chimps seem to agree that Reagan was the Great Small Government Conservative, let’s look at the data, since in our modern world, we have the ability to make charts and graphs at will with just the click of the mouse. And here, thanks to the radio guy rants, I’ll look at taxes and spending only, putting aside that mysteriously disappearing middle class. One of the common tropes, Red and Blue, is that “Reagan cut taxes.” This statement assumes that the listener is too stupid to know the difference between taxes and tax rates.

Here’s a graph of government revenues over time:

Not a map of the Matterhorn

Wow, look at how that went spiraling down in 1981-1989! Errrr… looking at all revenue must be a mistake, since there are revenue sources other than taxes. Where’s that tax graph?  Oh, here it is!

Oh, that’s much better

Clearly, Saint Ronald slashed taxes because… oh, wait. Never mind. It must have been the entitlement taxes he slashed. I’m sure I have that graph around here…

Whew, that’s even better!

That’s a dramatic Reagan-era tax cut, isn’t it? Ignore the sound of the narrative collapse, who are you gonna believe, a somewhat retarded radio guy or your lying eyes?

Well, of course all of this money we took in reduced the debt, right? Because of all that spending reduction by the Team Red Saint. Here’s proof:

Wayne Gretzky would be proud

Clearly, those conservatives did a great job of watching the public purse. Well, of course, that inflection point in the debt rise has to be attributed to defense, because spending on social programs was cut unmercifully by those green-eyeshades Reaganites. Any moron can see that:

Fuck the poor! Fuck ’em I say!

Now that’s what I call spending cuts. Look at how precipitously welfare spending declined.

Clearly Team Red and Team Blue are both right- here’s a guy who galloped into battle with Leviathan and slew it, putting to rest permanently the idea of Big Government and unrestrained spending and growth of the state. I’m glad that the Hate Radio guys educated me so well.