Even Jeb Bush says that Ronald Reagan would have a hard time fitting into today’s GOP.
Republicans still often speak lovingly of their adored “Gipper,” but the debate in Washington shows just how far the party has drifted from its idol.
Here’s one example. The Republican talking point these days is that raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans would be bad for the economy and hurt job creation. Reagan himself had a different view. He made the case for tax fairness this way in a 1985 speech:
We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary, and that’s crazy… Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?
Today, that sounds a lot more like something in an Obama speech than anything you’d hear from a Republican.









