I don't even care about Bush raising marginal rates on high incomes 3% or whatever. My complaint with him is he took us on a path after the USSR fell to embracing China and the globalist themes we still see today. The CCP should have been crushed then and there with Russia out of the way, but instead we started down this path of moving jobs and manufacturing to wherever is the cheapest, even if that means it's done by the most immoral countries who literally employ slave labor. And then there's his embrace of the UN deciding as much as possible, which if it were up to them would be everything even at the expense of US sovereignty.
And your Reaganomics points are way off base. He wasn't causing recessions. His first one was Carter's doing and Volcker having to raise interest rates to 20% to stop inflation. I was a kid but I'm old enough to remember my dad, as a small businessman, being crushed by Carter's incompetence and how much better things were under Reagan. Reagan, as any president, doesn't control the Fed. You know that. You talk about history, well, don't get your economics history from Paul Krugman.
Finally, the biggest reason Reagan's budgets were so big was his military buildup to beat the Commies, which he did. Sometimes you have to spend more now to profit later. Which is exactly what happened. We were much better off in the long run spending them into the ground than fighting them for a couple more decades (at least). Bush I and Clinton benefitted from that peace.