Really? Gee, that's funny, 'cause
I just looked it up and the tax revenue for the first year that Reagan submitted a budget (1982) for was $617B, and the revenue for the last year for which he submitted a budget (1989) was $991B. That's an increase of about 60% - and for some reason that doesn't seem like "doubling" to me.
So I checked the same set of years - the years for which they are responsible for submitting budgets (even if they did not submit budgets) - for Obama, and under him the revenues increased 68.5% - that's a bit more than Reagan did. Clinton's was 58%. And Bush 43's 'improvement' was 13.6%.
What's more, you'll find that
Reagan increased tax revenue not through "trickle-down", but by RAISING taxes:
And while Reagan somewhat slowed the marginal rate of growth in the budget, it continued to increase during his time in office. So did the debt, skyrocketing from $700 billion to $3 trillion. Then there's the fact that after first pushing to cut Social Security benefits - and being stymied by Congress - Reagan in 1983 agreed to a $165 billion bailout of the program. He also massively expanded the Pentagon budget.
"Ronald Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes," historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan's diaries, told NPR. "He knew that it was necessary at times. And so there's a false mythology out there about Reagan as this conservative president who came in and just cut taxes and trimmed federal spending in a dramatic way. It didn't happen that way. It's false."
It's important to note that Reagan's tax increases did not wipe out the effects of that initial tax cut. But they did eat up about half of it. And as Peter Beinart points out, the 1983 payroll tax hike went to pay for Social Security and Medicare. ("Reagan raised taxes to pay for government-run health care," Beinart writes.) Reagan also raised the gas tax and signed the largest corporate tax increase in history, an act Joshua Green writes would be "utterly unimaginable for any conservative to support today."
So...yeah, when it comes to increasing tax revenue, Reagan did much of it by raising taxes, and while he did better than Clinton or Bush 43,
Obama did even better - and let's not forget that Reagan doubled the deficit and more than tripled the federal debt, while Obama cut the deficit by more than half, even though the overall debt did double. But then, like Cheney said, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter". I guess that must be why y'all don't have any problem at all with Trump's $1.5T tax cut, with how it WILL blow up our federal deficit.
Man, but I bet y'all do hate it when you have to deal with real, actual numbers!
