Ronald Reagan's Legacy

His destructive economic policies do not deserve the press's praise.

by John Miller

lopsided distribution of the benefits of Reagan era economic growth. Investors made out during the 1980s, while workers lost out. After seeing their investments lose value during the 1970s, shareholders enjoyed real returns (i.e., adjusted for inflation) in the 1980s that rivaled those of the next decade's stock market bubble and far outdistanced the returns of the 1960s. Real weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers, on the other hand, took a beating, declining even more quickly than they had during the 1970s. Today, the average real earnings of nonsupervisory workers remain far below those of 30 years ago, despite healthy wage gains in the second half of the 1990s expansion, when unemployment rates dropped toward 4%.

bottom 40% of households paid out more of their income in federal taxes in 1988 than they had in 1980