It was, according to President Ronald Reagan, a powerful new plan: “And with you by our side, we’re not going to stop moving and shaking this town until that dream is real for every American, from the sidewalks of Harlem to the mountaintops of Hawaii.”

Reagan’s dream streaming down from the sun-kissed Koolau Mountains turned out to be a nightmare for the sick, homeless and mentally ill here and across the country, as Reagan and the GOP pushed through tax cuts in both 1981 and 1986.

The first was to stimulate the economy and move the U.S. out of a recession; the second was more GOP tax-cutting. The move introduced Americans to the phrase “Reaganomics” and the off-putting economic theory of “trickle-down economics.”

The thinking was that tax breaks, some up to 30 percent, to the rich would cause them to spend more and invest, and it would grow more jobs and the economy would boom and pay for the tax cuts. It mostly didn’t work that way because the federal deficit kept growing.

Still that’s the same GOP plan now speeding through Washington with the lobbying of House Speaker Paul Ryan and President Donald Trump.

It may have been “morning in America” for the rich back in Reagan’s time, but it was the beginning of a dark night for many less wealthy because they were about to lose much.

Today’s homeless can look directly at Reagan and his GOP tax plan for much of their misery. Reagan actually slapped the poor twice because while serving as governor of California, he presided over the deinstitutionalization in California of mental institutions, going from helping 37,000 patients in 1955 to only 2,500 now.

There were not enough community services for former mental patients and many found their only treatment was on the street or through the criminal justice system. Later as president, Reagan signed the 1981 budget reconciliation act, which put the responsibility of mentally ill patients back on the states.

The “Reaganomics” fiscal program contributed to the creation of 9 to 10 million more poor people in the 1980s, the increasing “feminization of poverty” in the United States, the rise of an “urban underclass” in the inner cities, and the widening relative gap between the rich and the poor within American society,” according to the Stanford University study, “The Causes of Homelessness in America” by Daniel Weinberger.

To pay for his tax cuts, Reagan and the Republicans cruelly cut federal housing programs.

Subsidized housing that is state-owned public housing and housing vouchers dropped from $26 billion to $8 billion.

Amazingly, in one of his last interviews before leaving office in 1988, Reagan said “there are always going to be people who live in the streets by choice.”

In Hawaii, the 2017 homeless count conducted in January found 7,220 sheltered and unsheltered homeless people. Our Department of Education reports serving 3,056 homeless students.

For years the GOP’s go-to argument against “big government” or increased government spending for social programs was that it drives up the deficit, that government spending causes a bigger deficit. Remember those “growing government deficit calculators” the GOP loved to tack on their webpages — but it was under Reagan that the national debt grew from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion. And that led to cutting social services.

Today Trump and the GOP congressional majority envision tax cuts that, according to many economists surveyed, will add $10 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

The debt won’t be repaid except through more gutting of services to the poor, the elderly, students and the infirm. And that will be a dark day for all.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.