Even after Reagan's death, the fantasies he promoted live on alongside the reality of economic ruin.

As the nation celebrates the hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birthday, the mischaracterization of his tenure as president is a national tragedy in itself. The media's need to gloss over its glaring failures -- failures that live on for all of us -- is now so common that it hardly draws notice. If the media sometimes deigns to note that Reagan blundered in the Iran-Contra scandal -- and almost surely violated the law, not to mention the much-adored U.S. Constitution -- it is quick to repeat the stale, dreary myth that he was a "transformative" president. President Obama has apparently bought in.

He was transformative. He taught America to hate government and in the process created an economy that utterly failed to restore itself or the nation's standard of living. He taught Americans not to be citizens who cared about each other but to ask what government did for them. And when asked, he distorted the answers. Does Obama truly not know this?

The outstanding technological achievements of the era were seeded well before Reagan. After all, the PC was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 1982, only a year into the Reagan presidency. It was Paul Volcker who defeated inflation, not Reagan. Then the stock market took off as interest rates fell from levels deflated for more than a decade; that unleashed venture capital, not Reagan tax or regulationist policies.

To the contrary, Reagan implemented massive tax cuts that increased the budget deficit enormously -- making Volcker's job all the harder. Reagan's political instinct was to latch on to Volcker's success by supporting his high interest rate policy enthusiastically, against the advice of some his staff, and then giving Americans a big tax cut.

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He was better at political compromise than is realized. He was forced to raise some business taxes because supply-side "voodoo" economics did not work. But the major tax increase was to raise payroll taxes, which are regressive. On balance, Reagan reduced taxes for the rich much more than for the middle.

More to the point, his supposed economic revival did not include the reinvigoration of entrepreneurial "animal spirits." While hostile takeovers mushroomed, often undermining jobs and R&D, with the critical help of tax-deductible mountains of debt, often Mike Milken's junk bonds, all-important productivity growth did not rise to historical rates. Small wonder, then, that typical wages did not rise and that income inequality started to explode under Reagan. Of course, Reagan broke the unions, and let's be clear, Volcker liked that. He thought they kept wages at inflationary levels. When we look back, that may have marked the end of the vigorous middle class in America.

And then of course there was the budget deficit. The deficit under Reagan rose to 6 percent of GDP, the highest since 1946. It never fell below 3 percent, higher than it reached in any of the four years of Carter's presidency. Obsession with the budget deficit has remained an American pastime ever since, adding impetus to the ineffectuality of government.

I won't comment here about the end of the Cold War. That too is fraught with myths. But let's be clear about Reagan's popularity. He was the Disney president. He told America that fairy tales do come true. Is this what Obama has learned from reading Reagan's fine biographer, Lou Cannon?

And much is forgotten about Reagan's ugly side. He had an angry, historically ignorant contempt for students' civil disobedience in the name of civil rights. As he ran for California governor, he played race when he talked about favoring the tax givers, not the "tax takers." From his moral perch, he liked to invoke the word "evil." He made up stories about his personal war record and how loving his marriage was to Jane Wyman. He earned his fortune not through grinding it out in Hollywood, but because rich men enabled him to buy property low and sell high.

And he had a superb talent for speaking to American anxieties. As I write in a new book, out in May, "Age of Greed", this anxiety of the working man is what he understood best. But he did not provide cure. He provided bromides and fantasies. How cruel! The economy still ails badly because of Reagan. One legacy in particular is rarely mentioned. He gutted the nation's federal anti-trust authorities. Mergers in finance, communications, entertainment, oil, retailing, and on led to the consolidation of economic power in America. Wall Street and CEOs got rich, but America did not. And this Age of Greed apparently continues. Happy birthday, Mr. President.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the author of The Case for Big Government.

Much could be done to help state budgets and reduce unemployment. None of them will happen.

Business Week reports that President Obama is considering seeking aid for state unemployment insurance programs burdened by debt because of high unemployment rates. At the margin, no complaints here about the idea, but it's fairly limited in scope and may not make that much of a difference.

The President is likely to encounter a political problem here because his proposed policy may well prevent things from getting worse without actually generating significant gains in employment or the condition of state finances. So he will encounter the same difficulty he experienced when he passed his $800 billion fiscal stimulus bill in 2009: he will be in the invidious position of trying to prove a negative (i.e. "things would have been much worse had we not passed this legislation"). Meanwhile, the GOP will have a field day touting the proposal as yet another instance of "kicking the can down the road" at the expense of far greater debt for our grandchildren.

In an ideal world (you know, the one where Democrats actually had control of both houses of Congress and acted like, well, Democrats, rather than the GOP Lite), there are any number of state aid programs that could take effect instantly and actually do much to generate higher levels of employment. The only prerequisite is the need for the federal government to start making serious investments. A few examples:

1) Start by making sure state and local governments do not lay off workers or cut back on vital programs, which avoids big losses to communities and helps local government to fight the recession.

2) Add emergency revenue sharing to states and cities by picking up increased shares of Medicaid, which has suffered drastic cuts in eligibility and coverage, and enables states to restore benefits to more people, which relieves household budgets.

3) Have government temporarily pay most of the cost of COBRA coverage for laid off people who lose their health insurance, and allow people over age 55 to buy into Medicare.

4) Expand unemployment insurance to cover part-time workers, extend the eligibility period, and increase benefit levels.

5) Roll back tuitions at state universities and community colleges, and increase Pell Grants -- contingent on universities not increasing costs to students -- which enables young people to spend the recession in college, rather than clogging unemployment rolls or graduating with huge debt burdens.

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Why does the current political climate make measures that would help grow the economy non-starters? There is still an inability to understand that irrespective of one's views about the role of government (its scope, size, etc.), the fortunes of the non-government sector are still heavily dependent on the conduct of fiscal policy. The GOP and the allies in the Tea Party want to pursue budget surpluses as an expression of their ideological preference for small government. But they fail to spell out the consequences of that choice and what it means for the private domestic sector. Whether we like it or not, in a modern monetary system the fortunes of government and the non-government sector are intrinsically related.

If households try to net save by spending less than they are earning, and businesses do the same by reinvesting less than their retained earnings, then nominal incomes and real output will be likely to fall IF THE GOVERNMENT IS CUTTING BACK FISCAL STIMULUS AT THE SAME TIME. Money incomes and economic activity will tend to contract until private savings preferences are reduced (with essential goods and services taking up a larger share of household budgets as incomes fall) or until depreciation leaves businesses and households inclined to invest once again in durable assets. Common sense suggests that a drop in private income flows while private debt loads are high is an invitation to debt defaults and widespread insolvencies -- that is, unless creditors are generously willing to renegotiate existing debt contracts en masse.

That has certainly not been the case so far. In fact, our current policy can be succinctly summarized as "bond holders uber alles." Debts have to be repaid. (Except, of course, when it applies to unions or public sector employees, in which case renegotiation is a given.)

It's very simple: To reduce unemployment you have to increase aggregate demand. If private spending growth declines, then net public spending has to fill the gap. As Randy Wray has argued:

If we say that the government can run budget surpluses for 15 years, what we are ignoring is that this means the private sector will have to run deficits for 15 years -- going into debt that totals trillions of dollars in order to allow the government to retire its debt. Again it is hard to see why households would be better off if they owed more debt, just so that the government would owe them less.

Quite the opposite in fact: when private debt service levels reach some threshold percentage of income relative to earnings, the private sector will "run out of borrowing capacity" as incomes limit debt service. The government doesn't face comparable limits. The whole thrust of policy here should be to ensure there is sufficient growth in nominal aggregate demand consistent with the real capacity of the economy to respond and consistent with full employment. Until we understand that, we'll have to be content with the half-measures proposed by the President.

Marshall Auerback is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and a market analyst and commentator.

After marking Reagan's 100th birthday this weekend, a blueprint for how reclaim the narrative about the tax code he distorted thirty years ago.

Many of us were disenchanted with President Obama’s compromise that kept the Bush tax cuts in place until 2012. But while it's easy to fault the president for failing to fight for increasing the tax rate for those earning over $250,000, the reason the GOP prevailed goes well beyond the intestinal fortitude of the current administration. This was a capitulation thirty years in the making.

Ever since the beginnings of the Reagan presidency, Americans have been bombarded by conservative mantras that consistently bemoan the supposed evils of progressive taxation. It is impugned with the pejorative description “confiscatory” or derided as a system that “penalizes success.” And at the heart of this message is an appeal to an atomistic impulse that constantly -- and needlessly -- pits the interest of the self against the interests of we as an American people.

But beyond refuting these stock conservative narratives, liberals have failed to articulate cogent arguments that frame progressive taxation in economically efficient and morally authoritative terms. The permanent extension of the Bush era tax rates is looming as a central issue in the 2012 presidential election. It is therefore not only critical that several foundational arguments be put forth in opposition, but that they also be part of a wider argument in support of progressive taxation as a vital component of wealth creation for both the individual and society.

Below are a few memes that if successfully injected into the public discourse would help transform the tax issue from being a losing discussion of confiscation into a winning question of basic fairness.

Progressive Taxation As An Antidote to Miserliness

As was the case during the Great Depression, we are currently experiencing an economic crisis of abundance, not poverty. There is great wealth out there, but it is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Yes, uncertainty plays a role in decreased investment activity. But so does the signature behavior of the miser: hoarding.

Large corporate entities are hoarding profits to pay bloated dividends and executive salaries or simply sitting on them instead of investing back in their businesses or paying their workers a better wage (thus stimulating demand). This is the scenario of savings exceeding investing that the economist John Maynard Keynes warned us about. Only government has the ability to prevent corporate miserliness. It alone can unfreeze credit and get capital circulating again.

When such hoarding takes place, the threat of taxation is a handy device to get money circulating again. A truly progressive system should present such hoarders a choice: either invest a portion of those profits in non-executive salaries and purchasing equipment or pay a premium tax.

The tax compromise of 2010 was a lost opportunity. While the GOP was harping about the national debt, Obama should have used progressive taxation to call the opposition on its campaign of misinformation. Instead of caving in, the president should have used the bully pulpit of his office to explain the economic inefficiency of extending the lower tax rates for our wealthiest citizens. We give tax cuts to those making less than $250,000 because they are more likely to spend it, while those earning above that income line (and especially those earning seven figures and more) are more likely to sock it away, taking money out of circulation. There is little or no stimulus effect to giving millionaires a four percentage point tax break; there is no economic benefit offsetting the widening national deficit that results.

The frame of the miser is a powerful image. More importantly, it is one that is easy to understand. It is Scrooge before his Christmas Eve epiphany; Henry Potter trying to shut down the old Bailey Brothers Building and Loan Association. More importantly, the concept is well grounded in Keynesian economics, defined by the master economist as “unreasonable but insistent inhibitions against acts of expenditure as such.” Indeed, it is a highly emotional term. But unlike many of the inflammatory epithets hurled by the right (“socialist,” “Marxist”), it is an authentic economic term of art.

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Equalizing Sacrifice

Perhaps the weakest link in the right’s tax argument is the idea that progressive taxation is based upon a system of confiscating wealth from the useful only to be given to a lazy rabble. This is nothing more than the old tactic of divide and conquer, injecting an “us versus them” aspect into the discourse.

Last year when some of the already wealthy heard that their federal tax rate should be adjusted a mere four percentage points up to 40%, they overreacted by complaining about the costs of nannies and gardeners. In 2003, Michael Novak tapped into this high-end sentiment. He equated progressive taxation with "confiscation" while quite recently his fellow neoconservative Robert P. George argued that taxes must remain low for moral reasons. Both arguments perfectly echo the conservative claim that higher tax rates on the wealthy constitute "a penalty for success."

This idea has gained more traction than many of us would like to believe. Just recently I spoke with two friends who repeated the claim when I suggested that the well-to-do could handle a modest increase on their federal tax rate -- especially those corporate CEOs who either hoard their companies' profits instead of investing in new equipment or, better yet, workers' salaries.

But such notions as "confiscation" and "penalizing success" have little to do with the realities we face as a people. "The goal of progressive taxes," historian Harlan Beckley observed of the economist Monsignor John A. Ryan’s argument on the subject, "…was to equalize sacrifices, not to achieve equality. Taxes should never be so progressive as to discourage socially useful activity or deny rewards for productive efficiency." To put things into a contemporary context, imposing a 40% tax rate upon an unmarried CEO earning seven figures a year is a bit more just than a rate of 35% -- especially when a married laborer earning $35,000 a year pays a federal tax rate of 25%. Even at the higher rate, the former should have more than enough superfluous income left over to meet his daily needs.

And a 40% top federal rate is far from onerous. Writing in the early 1960s when the maximum federal tax rate exceeded 90%, the conservative writer Willmoore Kendall declared that if the top bracket were to be lowered to 40%, it would allow anyone to become "smacking rich." Kendall’s words should be part and parcel of any argument in support of progressive taxation.

But beyond admissions made against interest by conservative thinkers, the original arguments in support of progressive taxation are as valid today as they were almost a century ago. Again, as Monsignor Ryan observed in 1916:

The reasonableness of the principle of progression has been well stated by Professor [Edwin R. A.] Seligman: "All individual wants vary in intensity, from the absolutely necessary wants of mere subsistence to the less pressing wants which can be satisfied by pure luxuries. Taxes in so far as they rob us of the means of satisfying our wants, impose a sacrifice upon us. But the sacrifice involved in giving up a portion of what enables us to satisfy our necessary wants is very different from the sacrifice involved in giving up what is necessary to satisfy our less urgent wants."

It is not merely the percentage of taxes paid that defines justice, but the payment in proportion to wealth created by each individual after which the basic necessities of life have been first satisfied. The working poor and the lower echelons of the middle classes should not be forced to pay a “flat tax” rate equivalent to wealthier members of our society; the overwhelming majority of the former’s income goes to basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter. They have little or no superfluous income. Thus, their tax burden should be the lightest.

Those who espouse the evisceration of such useful taxation are frankly arguing on behalf of an oligarchic few. It must be pointed out that there are top tax bracket Americans such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others who understand the discrepancy in sacrifice reduced tax rates for the wealthiest of us produces. With this in mind, those who call for flat rate taxation (Steve Forbes immediately comes to mind) would also be those whose contribution to the common good would be decreased. At the same time, the benefits they derive from that same common good remains unchanged: greater access to power, police and military power protection of their higher amount of treasure, and greater economic opportunity. It is nothing less than the notion that certain individual citizens give less simply because of their higher income status.

The complaint about the cost of nannies and elite private schools for their children not withstanding, progressive taxation does alleviate burdensome national debt; it does finance job-creating infrastructure construction; it does control inflation and it does prevent the concentration of economic power in the hands of the few -- all while expanding the ability of more Americans to prosper.

Indeed, the dogmatic opposition to progressive taxation is the economic mindset that elevates the wealth of a few fortunate individuals while the other 98 percent of their countrymen have their right to create wealth impeded. That, in no uncertain terms, is not the American way.

Frank L. Cocozzelli writes a weekly column on Roman Catholic neoconservatism at Talk2Action.org and is contributor to Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. A director of the Institute for Progressive Christianity, he is working on a book on American liberalism.

Everyone knows someone who's gay. But it's poor women who are the most visible in seeking abortions.

While Congress is in the midst of trying to toughen abortion restrictions, Barbara Bush (junior) has joined the ranks of the children of prominent Republicans who endorse gay marriage. For many conservatives, abortion and gay marriage both strike at the heart of the family. But children of prominent Republicans do not often raise their voices in support of abortion. Indeed, Bristol Palin, post-teen birth, has become a strong supporter of abstinence education. Why is this?

While support for gay marriage has increased among all age groups, there is a particularly strong base for people under the age of 30. Consider that in 2001, 21% of the "Silent Generation" (those born between 1928-1945) supported gay marriage -- a number that climbed to 29% in 2010. By contrast, 49% of the Gen Xers supported gay marriage in 2001, and 48% do so today. For those born since 1981, 53% support gay marriage.

For abortion, however, the opposite has happened. More people describe themselves as "pro-life" today -- among all age groups -- than did in 2001. Forty-three percent of the youngest group, those age 18-29, described themselves as "pro-life" in 2001; today, 47% of that age group views themselves as "pro-life." Those aged 65 and older have gone from 47% to 54%.

Children of prominent conservatives reflect the views of their age groups. But class is an overlooked part of the difference in attitudes -- a topic that we don't like to talk about. People with higher incomes are more likely to vote, and the most recent census data show that same-sex cohabiting couples have higher incomes than married couples. By contrast, women who have experienced an abortion are more likely to be poor; the rate of unintended pregnancy is significantly higher for poor women and for women with less than a high school education.

All of this, however, cloaks two basic facts. First, abortion is still critical for the middle class in holding the line on single parent births. While abortion rates have plummeted for college graduates, almost half of the unplanned pregnancies of the "responsible" middle class still end in abortion, a higher percentage than for any other group. The middle class, recognizing that abstinence until marriage at thirty is not going to happen, has embraced the pill. As a result of more effective contraceptive use, abortion rates have fallen dramatically and abortion has become a sign of failure, of carelessness. It is no longer an ordinary part of college life, but back in the shadows. It's rare enough to be easy to overlook, yet still critical for those on the road to the good life.

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For poorer women, on the other hand, abortion is once again a sign of desperation. In another time, the stigma associated with non-marital births drove women to back alley abortionists. Today, it is the desperation associated with poor women's inability to provide for the children they already have. A major change is the number of women seeking to abort who already have children. Middle class women who have children find it harder to abort a child simply because the pregnancy is inconvenient. For poor women, the abortion may involve a choice between continuing an unwelcome pregnancy or feeding and buying medicine for the children they already have.

The cutbacks in welfare, medicaid, and other social programs for the poor are largely invisible; indeed, conservatives are still on the airwaves railing about welfare programs that no longer exist. The only sign of the hunger and desperation of poor women's lives that receives attention is their willingness to abort. For politicians, abortion is a symbolic issue that does not affect anyone they care about.

In contrast, every community has gay and lesbian members. As our sons, sisters, and uncles come out of the closet, appreciation for the struggles of same-sex couples increases. Barbara Bush, who is reported to have had many gay and lesbian friends at Yale, is much less likely to have spent time with women talking about their abortions. The increasing empathy for gays and lesbians enriches us. The decreasing empathy for the circumstances that produce abortion diminishes all of us and allows the most vulnerable to be used as pawns in a fight that has little to do with the reality of their lives.

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. She is the author of numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.

Cahn and Carbone are the co-authors of Red Families v. Blue Families.