It is not inaccurate, it is biased. The author sets out to criticize Reagan, and does so. For example, he mentions that "[Reagan] started off with a bang by increasing state taxes nearly $1 billion in his first year in office — the biggest tax increase in California history." However, the author fails to mention two key components to that tax hike. One was that Reagan was a Republican governor, with (if I recall) a Democratic state legislature. If memory serves me correct, the tax hike was a compromise package (Dems wanted to increase taxes even higher) and at the same time Reagan froze government hiring.
Reagan wasn't a magician. He couldn't come into the governorship, wave a magic wand and implement every policy that he wished to implement. He had a state legislature to contend with.
But yet, he signed the budget. He signed into law the massive tax increase.
I hear this same pathetic apologizing from Gary Johnson supporters. Look, the fact is all these people's voting record is terrible. All these governors, Reagan, Johnson, Romney, etc., took their big feathered pen out of their big pen-holder and signed -- did
not veto, rather
signed -- measures tremendously increasing the size and scope of their states' tyrannical hordes.
It's really very simple why I have a problem with these politicians: they support increasing the amount of tyranny rather than decreasing it. They support abridging people's freedoms rather than respecting them. They support using aggressive violence to get what they want. They do all this with their actions, even though their mouths may be making different noises. I really do not know why people give the noises coming from their mouths a second thought, since they bear no relationship whatsoever with reality. They're just noise.
The above is completely (and obviously) true of the mass-murdering piece of garbage Reagan <spit>. It is less true of Gary Johnson, who did use his veto pen relatively a lot, though only relative vs. all the other governors at the time, not relative to what any true lover of liberty would have done. Still, in a band of criminals, Johnson was at least quantifiably less criminal than the rest, while Reagan was at least as criminal as the worst of them, just as Romney was. Romney and Reagan are essentially the same, the noises coming from their mouths are just slightly different, but that's just a factor of keeping up with the times (wouldn't want to sound dated), and no one should care what these noises are in the least. They're just noise.
