[encoderer]

> President Ronald Reagan and his tax policy chief Donald Regan were more right wing than the Koch brothers and Michelle Bachmann combined

I think this is where your memory skews.

By the standards of the time, that is true.

But today? Reagan supported AMNESTY. He supported a tax reform bill that RAISED some taxes. EITC??? That's a means-tested welfare program to try to lift working poor above the poverty line.

I grew up a liberal. I still am, but I'll be honest, my idealism is tested by our tax rate and fiscal ignorance. If you have no kids or mortgage, live in California and make over 100k -- in other words if you're like most software engineers in bay area startups -- you pay an obscene tax rate. And I'd even be OK with that if Sacramento and D.C. were good stewards of our tax dollars. But, of course, they're not.

Still, I have no choice but vote Democratic. I could vote 3rd party and waste my vote. But today's breed of hyper-partisan, non-fact-base Republicans just are not a serious alternative.

[twoodfin]

"Yesteryear's Republicans were reasonable. It's just this crop that's a bunch of know-nothing radical fascist reactionaries" was said in the 1980's as much as it's said today. It was said in 1994 about Newt Gingrich and Co. just a few years before they worked with President Clinton to reform welfare and balance the budget. "This is not your father's Republican party" was a favorite line of House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, if I recall correctly.

[Evbn]

California taxes pay for California, and SV engineers owe their industry to Californka being California.