Ever have the feeling we’re reliving history? The present historical moment¾ replete with the largest tax cuts in history, a dramatic rise in military spending, a soaring federal budget deficit, and impending calls for slashing social spending to restore fiscal order¾ is eerily reminiscent of the Reagan years nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Paraphrasing Mr. Reagan’s famous repartee to President Carter in the 1980 presidential debates: Here we go again….

Tax cuts were the centerpiece of President Ronald Reagan’s domestic agenda. Under Reagan’s leadership, the highest marginal individual income tax rate was slashed nearly in half from 70 percent when he took office to 38 percent when he left. Reagan’s famed supply-side economic theory promised that placing money in the pockets of America’s wealthiest would stimulate the economy and create new jobs. Tax cuts for the rich would fund an elevator to lift the poor from their poverty. However, trickle-down economics didn’t work out quite as planned. The elevator budget (along with spending on other social programs) was slashed, leaving the elevator capable of traveling only in the "down" direction when poor people were on board.

President George W. Bush inherited a weakening economy, which he promised to turn around with a $1.35 trillion tax cut, larger than Reagan’s cuts, but equally tipped to favor the richest Americans.

Three tax cuts later, a $5 trillion projected ten-year surplus has turned into a projected ten-year deficit of $5 trillion and counting. One-third of this dramatic change in fortune is attributable to the president’s tax cuts, according to a recent joint report by the Committee on Economic Development, The Concord Coalition, and The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The national debt is soaring at a rate not seen since, well, here we go again…Ronald Reagan. When Reagan entered office, the national debt stood at $930 billion. When he left eight years later, the debt had nearly tripled to $2.6 trillion. During President Bush’s first two years in office, the national debt has risen nearly 20 percent from $5.7 trillion to more than $6.8 trillion. Poverty rates have risen in each of the two years since the first Bush tax cut, leaving 12.1 percent of the nation’s citizens living beneath the poverty line, according to a recent Census Bureau report.

As the federal budget deficit explodes, those in the Bush Administration who not long ago championed a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution sit idly by as the public grows increasingly anxious.

We should not be surprised if the next act in the Reagan sequel is for President Bush next year to declare war on social programs. Since the early 1980s, inflation-adjusted spending on programs like affordable housing and education has contracted, with many of these responsibilities being shifted to the states. Sadly, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

But even the actor-president Reagan recognized the play didn’t need to end that way. He added two elements to the budget plot: an increase in the top income tax rate, and a radical purging of abusive corporate tax loopholes that had left many of the country’s most profitable businesses paying nothing into the federal treasury. Neither of these twists appears in the political scripts President Bush is reading from.

"Here we go again" leads us to an emasculated government consigned to the role of a watchtower state. It’s time to hum a different tune. Something like "Happy Days Are Here Again," the post-Depression ditty that accompanied a time of shared prosperity, when the United States moved from a watchtower state to one where government spending on programs such as the GI Bill and federal mortgage insurance created broad economic opportunities that allowed America to move forward in hope. —S.Klinger