“When Ronald Reagan came to power, what did he do? He reduced the top tax rate from 70% to 30%, as I’ve already said, and he began a huge arms race with the Soviet Union, which was deficit financed, and towards the end of the Reagan administration his top budget director, David Stockman, said, ‘Well, our plan was to run up the debt in such a way that in retiring the debt we could get rid of all the social programs we didn’t like and cut all the environmental regulations which industry didn’t like.’ That, of course, is just what they set about doing. So, the debt was an excuse to do that. It was an excuse to lead a class assault on the welfare structure and a class assault on the environmental regulations.”

David Harvey “The End of Capitalism”