Depending on who you ask, someone will always have a different opinion on America’s president; his questionable character, his career background consisting of suspiciously non-political activities, and even his speech. Something that cannot be argued upon, however, are the ways in which his choices on taxation and policies have changed the way our country will forever function. This president, who despite his striking similarities to the current president, Donald Trump, is none other than the 40th American president, Ronald Reagan.

Of course it’s much more complicated than Trump just being an exact clone of Reagan. The 80’s were a long time ago, and you couldn’t compare someone’s actions involving their environment if the environment is that drastically different. “The globalization of the world during Reagan is not the same as the globalization of the world today,” said former economics teacher and current AP Human Geography teacher, Dr. Bryan Wierzchuki. He expressed that when you juxtapose the two, there’s a couple things that can’t be directly compared; like how they responded to the world at the time, and the overall choices they made based on specific events that effected them.

So why make the comparison? What would the point be? What about their ideologies then is so similar that it’s worth pointing out? What went so wrong the first time that it should bother us that Trump is starting to repeat history?

How they’re similar, in short, is through the priority they held for the upper class, and what should be scary about that, is how poorly it ended for the lower class in the 80s.

Reagan had believed in and invented a new stereotype; the “Welfare Queen.” He described this using a story of a woman who, under several names and multiple addresses, took advantage of the welfare system, and whose, in his words, “tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” Leading with this in mind, Reagan went on to make billions of dollars in cuts to welfare programs, most significantly AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children).

Clearly worried about those in the country who went tax free, Ronald lowered the tax bracket. The tax bracket describes how much you pay in accordance to what you make. Before his presidency, the most that those with the highest income were paying in taxes was 70%. This meant that 70% of what they made had to be paid back in taxes. After Reagan, it was 28%. Though 7/10th of what a person or business makes can be seen as an outrageous amount of money, it must be made clear that this only applied if the income they received was already an outrageous amount. This change in the tax bracket effectively made it so there was no “evening out of the playing field,” that the rich got richer, and the poor stayed poor, or in a result of welfare cuts, became even poorer.

Trump also lowered the tax bracket in his 2017 “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”, from 35% to 21% for Corporations, and down to 37% for individuals. This applied to married couples who with a joint income made 470,700, individuals making 410,000, and large business making 18.33 million.

A lot of this steamed from an ideal that Reagan led with; the “Trickle Down Theory”. It’s a theory that if they let the richest people and businesses among us keep their money and exempt them from large taxes, parts of their income will eventually make its way down to the poorest among us. This hypothesis of his did not account for, however, the greed of those beyond the upper class: the 1%

The way Ronald Reagan shifted the way our economy functions has moved it to a place where even our country’s first priority is the “one percent.” Similarly, Trump has continued this throughout his entire time as president. Known for his anti immigration politics, in 2025 he created the “Gold Card”; a green card for the cost of 1 million dollars. Reagan would be so proud if he could see Trump creating a system in which he keeps poor people out of the country, and only letting in those who can pay their way through; supporting only the rich.

These forms of action of what define a lot of Reagan’s legacy as president; known universally as Reaganomics. One day soon, The actions that Trump has made and that he will continue to make will be known as something similar. As a former businessman and 1%, how long will he have in power to keep making his other business friends richer by lowering their taxes?

There is one thing you could hand to Ronald Reagan; something that would discourage comparison to Trump for the sake of Reagan’s reputation. He’s not a convicted Felon or Sex Offender.