John Brenan's attempt March 24 to show Reagan's economic policies as anything but war on the poor and middle class is a sad testimony to the conservative propaganda campaign to rewrite history.

His figures on median income growth are incorrect because they aren't adjusted for inflation.

Even though national productivity has steadily risen since 1980, approximately doubling every decade, the share of the bottom 90 percent decreased more than 20 percent from 1980 to 2006, while the wealthiest 1 percent nearly tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation's income. The top 1 percent of Americans now owns more than the bottom 90 percent.

Reagan reduced the top tax rates for the wealthy and corporations in 1981, resulting in the worst recession since the 1930s. In 1983, he signed the largest payroll tax increase in history, promising to create a Social

Security surplus to fund baby boomer retirements, knowing he would loot it to pay for additional tax cuts for the wealthy, which he did. He simultaneously raised the bottom rate and taxed unemployment benefits. Our Social Security surplus is gone. The transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy has been up to $3 trillion, according to economist Ravi Batra.

A progressive income tax is not "penalizing success" or "envying the rich." It is necessary in order to avoid excessive concentrations of wealth and power that, if left unchecked, would result in economic collapse and destruction of the system that enables people to generate wealth in the first place.

Ted Daum, Corvallis