However, there is also something to be learned from it, namely how to successfully implement a government program - by coupling it with the interests of a broad segments of the population so they see themselves as beneficiaries - even if that is largely illusory. The problem with most left-sponsored programs (except social security!) is that they are ostensibly designed to help only the "less fortunate" or other narrowly defined interests, which creates what the economist Burton Weisbrod called the "median voter" rebellion - i.e. a situation when most voters object to using their tax dollars to fund special interests.
The Right managed to convince the "median voter" that everyone benefits from a tax cut, hence the popular support of that program. To be sure, they had several things working in their favor, such as gutter populism and its knee-jerk rejection of big institutions, the de-facto "means-testing" attached to almost every social program in this country which allows them to be plausibly portrayed as serving narrowly defined interests, the absence of institutional Left capable of counter-weighing the Right propaganda, and - of course - the political illiteracy of the US populace due in a large part to the absence of any public campaigns to educate the public how modern institutions work (by contrast, EU has plenty of such campaigns).
Wojtek