JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 22 Mar 2015 16:58:44 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recent analysts have traced the rise of Reaganomics to the rise of cowboy capitalists and to a "right turn" of the corporate elite. We provide a policy history of the formulation of the Reaganomics program and its insertion into the national political agenda, showing that it stemmed from policy-planning efforts of a new conservative network of policy organizations. During the 1970s, this conservative network synthesized fiscal conservatism, monetarism, and supply-side economics into a new economic program of austerity and supply-side tax incentives. We then provide an elite analysis of the structure of this policy network, showing that the inner circle and upper tier of the capitalist class supported the austerity camp as well as the traditional Keynesian moderates, while sunbelt cowboys tended to support the more conservative supply-siders. The corporate elite remains the hegemonic group within the capitalist class, working in coalition with a newly mobilized cowboy stratum.

This study presents data from a community survey of Oklahoma City which suggests that the putative tax rebellion is neither as massive nor as homogeneous as some observers contend. The data support Buchanan's contention that the widespread support for tax reduction has occurred because the costs, defined in terms of potential cutbacks in government expenditures, are not specified in the proposed legislation. In addition, the findings suggest that people vary in what costs they are willing to incur in order to lower taxes. Some people support tax reduction out of a desire to limit welfare spending and others out of a desire to reduce spending on collective goods. We suggest that the former represents a traditional, conservative response to liberal welfare legislation. However, we identify the latter as a new interest group in American politics which cross-cuts traditional lines of cleavage. Some observers have interpreted the rash of legislative attempts across the country to reduce taxes as the beginning of a tax rebellion of &dquo;massive&dquo; proportions (Field, 1978; &dquo;The revolt's deeper roots,&dquo;1978;Musgrave, 1979). A less optimistic appraisal of the movement has been offered by Buchanan (1979) who contends that the widespread support for tax reduction proposals occurs largely because the costs of tax reduction, defined in terms of potential cutbacks in government expenditures, are not specified in proposed legislation. Two consequences may be antici-Authors' Note: We thank the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oklahoma, for providing funds for this project. The data m this report were collected as part of a larger survey linked to the graduate training program in methods and statistics in the Department of Sociology.

No abstract

No abstract