No ones goes into politics with malicious intent
But power corrupts
And power gives one the impression that they are infaliable so they stop taking sound advice .
Regan probably believed that by substantially reducing the tax on the very wealthy they would spread their money around to the benefit of all .
The fact that the vast majority would only use the extra cash to make even more cash at a higher return rate probably never crossed his mind .
However it is a simple fact that the megga rich become megga rich because the one thing they worship above all is money and none of them can ever have enough until they are the wealthiest person in the street, club, church, company, state, country, planet and most carry on that way till they are faced with their own mortality and the one tax they can not avoid death duties / inheritance tax when they suddenly become very philanthropic because they want their idology to survive them.
Bill gates is the perfect example of this, a man who became rich by stealing, manipulating politicans , crushing any opposition with a business plan that would make any autocrat proud .
Now he is staring at the grim reaper approching his front door he has become a humanitarian totally forgetting about all those he crippled and those who he bankrupted into their graves .
We had similar Prime Ministers down here.
Whitlam believed deeply in the nobility & generosity of the working class so he abolished university course fees,( a couple of years too late for me ) in the belief that the children of working class parents would all become engineers , doctors , scientists & great humanitiarians
In reality the children of the working class were ever bit as greedy, spiteful & nasty as their wealthy contemporaries so they all became accountants, economist & lawyers & stuffed their own pockets to the detriment of all .
Like the UK we have a permenant public service there to give free , frank & accurate advice to governments.
However every new administration rips out public service jobs so then they hire consultants to give them the answers they want to hear and when it goes wrong they can blame the consultants for getting it wrong and not take the blame themselves.
One of my friends I went to uni with used to work for the public service.
He & about 100 or so others read every newspaper, government press release, Business journal ,notice to stock exchanges & company returns world wide.
When he found some thing that a minister should be made aware of, the article was copied & sent to his supervisor for further copying & distribution.
Things that needed more investigation then got sent to another section for detailed investigation.
So for example when President O'Bama gave GM a BS loan of 4 billion to build a state of the art aluminium foundry in Michigan this was big news as it was the first new foundry to be built by an American company on American soil for nearly 20 years and it was due for completion in 2016.
Now GM Australia made a loss of every car that rolled off the production line but it made a massive profit ( carefully hidden from the government ) from the foundry as we made nearly all of the alloy castings for GM world wide and as it is expensive to ship an alloy block or head from here to Vietnam or Mexico for machining & assembly we machined & assembled most of them here using precision parts imported from other GM plants ( one way to hide the profits ) .
Thus the new US foundry would make GM Australia financially unsound so it was no surprise to me when they announced in 2015 that the Aust plants would close in 2016 but it was to the government because they had no idea of how GM Australia made its money and no idea that the foundry was going to be built despite it being in just about every USA newspaper almost weekly ,
So of course the government of the day hired a consultant to do a report that was so wrong it was not funny
They stated that there would be 1400 direct job losses at GM ( totally ignoring that Ford would also pull out & Toyota as well ) plus a further 2,000 indirect jobs lost, ignoring that Allied transport alone had 1800 owner drivers who worked exclusively making deliveries to GM so they could practice "just in time" manufacturing
In total over 300,000 people lost their jobs and 15,000 companies closed down but the failure to know this was blamed on the short time frame to make the report .
Ford, GM, & TOYOTA have all been waiting for one of them to close down since the Howard government abolished import duties on most US cars so there was no point in US companies making cars in Australia , but none of them wanted the bad will that would created if they were the first one to pull out .
