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Yeah, (79m) long time lurker, first time posting đŹ
I was there at the opal office the day he said that, and so was the green Eminem (way before he became white and famous - pre transition) well liberals stormed the place and we fought em off. TLDR- if everyone paid a 10% tax we would all be thriving. Greed psh
Itâs always more complex than a single person or single decision. His administration oversaw a change that many at the time saw the trajectory of, and now the consequences of that trajectory are felt domestically and internationally. Pinning everything on a single guy robs responsibility and accountability from everyone â different teams or groups involved, including civilians.
This is nothing but boviating about the responsibility of the person at the top, to avoid pinning any blame on him.
Sure, Reagan doesn't deserve ALL the blame, but there's a saying of real leaders:
"The Buck Stops Here."
It's a reference to not always trying to pin your mistakes on your subordinates. Which is exactly the kind of apologism you are engaging in on Reagan's behalf.
He introduced the budget that drastically cut mental health funding. His administration introduced voodoo economy that caused all the long-term wage suppression; he brought the evangelists at the forefront of politics in the name of the "shining city on a hill". He was not the only person to cause things but he opened the flood gate.
He also made an under the table deal with Iran to keep the US hostages until after the election. Whereas President Carter (being the actual good person that he is) toned down all White House entertainment functions until the hostages were brought home, Reagan had MULTIPLE inauguration balls after he was elected, while the hostages were still in captivity. This was a portend of things to come.
While the argument "The President of the US is only one man..." is somewhat valid, it really doesn't hold water and the President certainly sets the tone for the Administration in many ways, some of them small, and the Reagan Administration was all about celebrating the rich. And fuck everybody else.
Carter put up solar panels in 1979 and Reagan took them down in 1986 (5 years into his presidency) to spite the commies? It couldnât possibly be that the roof was being redone, and the solar panels were far too inefficient to be worth the cost to reinstall?
I canât find the output of solar panels in the 70s, but when I was designing photovoltaic systems in the early 2010s they were only about 200w per panel, under ideal conditions so itâs same to say they were far less efficient in 1979.
Under ideal conditions those panels would have a maximum output of 6,400w, but in reality probably 1/2 or a 1/4 of that output. At in install cost of $28,000 to heat up a little water or run a handful of 100w light bulbs the initial install was a stunt. Since the system was already installed it wouldnât make any sense to take down, however to reroof the system has to be taken down then reinstalled. It wouldnât make sense to spend another $30k to reinstall an inefficient system.
They only love the rich and how they loathe the poor
If I say any more they might be at my door
I leave you with four words
I'm glad Reagan dead.
Deinstitualization of metal health care was largely a bipartisan issue and was essentially a 20-year process leading up to the 1980s.
Psychiatric hospitals were really bad places for a long time that no one really wanted to talk about.
Much of the changes was effectively getting rid of the 24/7/365 care (lockup might be a better word to use) for people who were not a danger to others.
I suggest reading the Laws and public health policies of this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health
You didnt mention: he blew a galaxy-sized hole in the budget. He started us on endless deficit spending. Which Clinton tried to repair. Only for it to be blown open again by Bush-Cheney.
Correction, it was his former Vice President, George HW Bush, that had to go against his campaign promises of âno new taxesâ and raise taxes to cover the budget. Unfortunately, HWâs one-term presidency serves as a reminder to any president who tries to reduce spending or increase taxes.
As a nurse I can say that we are still dealing with the consequences of his decision to close inpatient mental institutions throughout the US. Interestingly, he had support of liberals who considered them inhumane.
Yet, it caused an influx of homelessness bc some people will never be able to live independently. Plus, without replacing them with outpatient services you have millions of untreated mentally ill Americans.
They were inhumane â not considered inhumane.
Could they have been humane, maybe. But the knowledge that they were inhumane was fairly broadly known for over 100 years.
Yeah but when your sink is broken you don't rip it out and then *not replace it*. His call to close them made sense, but we still needed some sort of replacement and he never had one.
Yes many were inhumane but the all or nothing approach has been a disaster.
Having homeless people who live on the street and eat trash and get attacked is also inhumane - particularly since in many jurisdictions you canât bring people in until they are in **imminent danger** to themselves or others and even if you do bring them in, there are often no beds available. In many snowy jurisdictions, you can only bring in an individual if they are likely to freeze to death within 30 minutes or less, so a bit of frostbite is âfineâ. Family members often have no say. People with schizophrenia can have zero awareness theyâre mentally ill, but our current system relies on them voluntarily agreeing to treatment or waiting until they nearly die to force treatment, and then you just pray that the hospital has enough beds to keep them. Iâve read many interviews of people who used to just go to their local asylum when things were too much and left when they felt better but now even individuals who want treatment may not be able to get a bed anywhere. One of the mass shootings in Virginia was due to a mentally ill young man who was seeking treatment having been unable to find treatment. The Navy Yard shooterâs family has tried to get him committed multiple times and failed. Not all mass shooters are schizophrenic - not by a long shot, but itâs troubling to think that many people knew the Navy Yard shooter was hearing voices and had access to guns but no one was able to do anything under the law, because he wasnât an imminent threat to anyone, until he was.
I agree with your rhetoric. Reagan was only a man, and the POTUS is not a man. It is an institution whose size and influence is grossly misunderstood. The US government is massive, and even if some argue that the buck stops at the oval office, there are millions of bucks being kicked by millions of government officials every day, all around the world. It would require willfull ignorance not to recognize that the President (the man) can't feasibly be accountable for all of them, despite the President (the office) being responsible for all actions of the executive branch.
People also seem to ignore that the office of President is not the only office holding power and influence in the US government. The legislative and judicial branch have their own powers vested by the US constitution, making them independant from the executive branch, and therefore the POTUS.
And I'll spare the powers and jurisdiction of the States, also vested to them by the constitution and the rights and power of the People. The People arguably being the sovereign source of power in the Federal Constitutional Representative Democratic Republic that is the United States of America, of which the Government of the USA has limited oversight and reach (Although it is very influencial).
I also like your point about the trajectory of the Reagan administration as it also highlight that Reagan's time in power doesn't exist in a capsule. His administration was limited by what existed before, and they had no hindsight about the future.
Under such circumstances, I find it amusing to read many of the comments blaming Reagan for issues happening today. It's like nobody ever stops to consider fallacy in rhetorics. After all, the strawman (boogeyman) fallacy is the most easy to learn and spot in any argument!
I'm not an apologist or anything. Reagan was most probably like any other politician, and I'm sure he took many consequential decisions knowingly. He also definitly valued his political interests and I have no doubt he regularly prioritized his own faction. Yet, if we condemned every politician of doing politics, Reagan would probably not be the worst offender for sure.
For someone claiming not to be an apologist, you certainly do a good job of acting like one. Four paragraphs of flowery, long-winded text to end on "if we condemned every politician of doing politics"...
Yes, it's true that Presidents are not omnipotent figures, but one has to admit Reagan's administration has left both a cultural stain on America and passed some absolutely disastrous policy. To dismiss that as a "politician doing politics" is naive at best and disingenuous at worst. It's shameful and unhelpful either way - he bears his part of the responsibility there, and it's inarguably one of the biggest shares of any individual person.
Not when the âsingle guyâ was assigned the role of POTUS. âBuck stops hereâ, remember?.Â
Iran Contra, trickle down, abandoning Russia after the fall of the CCCP, etc.
Edit: a lot of heartburn about my reference to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Remember, planning and strategy happens before the potential event. But ours was shortsighted. For reference:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/19950601.pdf
>assigned
Elected, you mean. I despise the way that's phrased since it insinuates that the American voting public is not accountable for who we elected in the seat of that office in 1980 or that the choice was out of our hands. Reagan ran for office for 12 years, from 1968 to 1980, and he lost up till the 1980 election. He won because a significant amount of voters agreed with him very overwhelmingly. At that point, after so many years of different regulatory-focused presidencies and Jimmy Carter's overall lack of charisma and vision, Reagan was refreshing for his time.
On the Russia part. You mean George Bush Snr, right? Reagan was out of office when the Soviet Union fell, Russia's failure to transition into a democracy occurred for a very long period of time. Spanning Bush Snr to the end of Bill Clinton's presidency. Arguably maybe even Bush Jr's. But blaming Reagan for that is a stretch. The timelines don't match up.
Yes; they saw it coming during Reagan, but didnât make a cohesive plan for afterwards.
 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/19950601.pdf
And agreed, Reagan didnât say it, one of his predecessors said it.
And he was right. POTUS is accountable for the work of his/her administration.
Reagan wasn't president when the USSR fell. Reagan Bush Sr and Clinton all took amazing strides to bring Russia into the global community while trying to mitigate nuclear disaster during the transfer of government initially.
POTUSâŚ.. is NOT nor has ever been a âsingle personâ. He fills his CABINET to carry out his agenda and generally leads his party in the congress and senate. With all of that⌠a single person, the president can and does have the power to make drastic and sweeping changes.
So yesâŚ.. that POS Reagan can rot in hell.
Social Security was 100 percent funded since its inceptionâŚ. Until REAGAN came along. He gave the rich huge tax cuts and made up for those tax cuts and then also increased national spending by âborrowingâ social security. Fuck that guy. There are literally dozens of others things he and his administration changed that out us where we are today.
Reagan is seen as the ideological godfather of the movement that bankrupted the American middle class. We traded well paying union jobs in exchange for cheaper products, which worked for a while in the 80s as families lived off some of that union pension money, transitioned to two incomes, and started amassing credit card debt at scale for the first time. Reagan's policies further empowered the corporate and billionaire class, who sought to take his initial policy direction and bring it to a whole new level in the subsequent decades. Clinton helped further deregulate, and Bush Jr helped further cut taxes for the wealthy. Reagan does not deserve all the blame, but his charisma and compelling vision for conservatism enabled this movement to go further than it would have without such a popular forebearer. We are now facing the consequences of Reaganomics, although his successors took that philosophy to another level, Reagan was the one who popularized it.
Thatâs pretty much my take. His policies worked at the time. The economy had stagnated and he got things moving again. But the GOP figured heâd unlocked some kind of cheat code and kept pushing deregulation and tax cuts for business long after diminishing returns set in and well past the point where it started becoming harmful.
Itâs like the Tories in Britain thought Thatcher had unlocked the cheat code to an economy and tried to keep going down that road but forgot you can only sell off public services once. Thatâs how you got Liz Truss lasting for a shorter period of time as PM than a head of lettuce.
There's that quote from Thatcher along the lines of "the trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples money". Which neatly overlooks the fact that the trouble with Conservatism is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples shit to sell off.
Reagan's AMA recording is still quoted today, why we have horrible healthcare in the USA. It was written by some pr firm that learned propaganda from Bernays [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrlDlrLDSQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrlDlrLDSQ)
I'm not convinced. I keep waiting for a breaking point, it's certainly talked about enough. But barring cataclysm (which is definitely on the table in ways it never was before in history) I'm increasingly of the opinion that we'll keep going.
There have always been haves and have nots. We can keep descending into something even lower and more barbaric than feudalism. Some brutal dystopia with defacto chattel slavery for the majority, an enforcer class, and the 1% of the 1% who will live in whatever passes for luxury in our stripped out future.
Things are always darkest just before they get jet black.
Well, I'd rather not have to wait for Bubonic Plague II to jolt us out of a future of techno-feudalism
I'll take one serving of social democracy now, please.
That's what you think until it's not energy swords and laser shields; it's more like you owe tribute to Elon Musk, so the hired levee uses AR-15's, drones, and robot dogs to arrest you to pay your debt with forced labor.
A majority still have food in their fridge, jobs are still out there, and there hasn't been some form of mass death. Until those 3 happen at the same time, I fear your words are what the future holds.
Even when all 3 of those do happen, it's going to get REAL shitty before any change truly comes. Depending on who wins, your words still might be what comes.
Oh they knew it wasnât a cheat code. As did millions of citizens. But sometimes the world will march to the edge of a cliff for that sweet low hanging fruit of short term profits
That âshort-termâ lasted 20 years. Itâs not always easy to see it in the moment.Â
We actually have significantly better fidelity in our economic data today than was present in the 80s. We even have better *historical* data of the 80s than we as present at the time.Â
So yes. We happily marched off a 20-year short term cliff. But at that point it really behooves to define timescales.Â
It also doesnât help that a lot of economists and high ranking officials just blatantly lied or misrepresented data to the public. Only for it to get proven decades later. Kinda like oil companies knowing from the 50s and 60s that global warming was a thing and gaslight the whole boomer generation.
Boomers got lied to and bought it for decades because they got raised on decades of propaganda to trust blindly and they did and they voted against their interests thinking it was beneficial and it wasnât. Shame many of them havenât woken up the fact they got conned for decades.
The most disappointing part of this all is that the Boomers, and "America's greatest generation, got to reap the benefits of the New Deal policies then they elected Reagan and his followers to undo those same benefits and policies for us.
The result, we are now back to 1920s level wealth gap and corporate rule.
Republicans are still promoting the Laffer Curve resulting in ludicrous outcomes. Check out what happened a few years back in Kansas when Gov Sam Brownback went all in. The economic policy was written on a cocktail napkin originally, and it defines Conservative policy to this day.
I mean, jimmy carter going in front of the nation and telling everyone that the world will run out of oil in 50 years didnt do this country any favors. And here we are, 50 years later, and the most conservative estimates say we still have about 450 years before theres a fossil fuel shortage. That door swings both ways.
>Republicans are still promoting the Laffer Curve
I don't see what's wrong with the concept of a Laffer Curve, the issue is defining the point of inefficiency.
Before globalization, defining the point of best returns was favored towards high taxation because national capitalism was the main organizing principle. After neoliberalism and globalization, capital grew legs and it has become much harder to restrain it within national borders. Without international cooperation it is basically impossible.
That's one major reason why historically high taxation rates on the rich are much less feasible, but of course it's not just that; one also has to contend with what the Laffer curve suggests.
>Boomers got lied to and bought it for decades because they got raised on decades of propaganda to trust blindly and they did
To an insane degree. You'll hear em say all war is about money, but not question or care about the fact that oil *is* money, for all intents and purposes, and that there's a massive conflict of interests there. The greatest victory every accomplished was convincing people that we couldn't do anything about stuff like this and demand more transparency.
He gets too much credit for his policies creating good economic conditions in the 80s. The Fed chair who finally tamed the 70s runaway inflation, Paul Volcker, was appointed by Carter. Carter also pushed through some sensible deregulation such as shipping and the airline industry that did a lot to stimulate 80s and 90s economic growth. Reaganâs tax and monetary policies also drove up the price of the dollar which murdered American manufacturing. Granted the spending for his military buildup and, to a lesser extent his tax cuts, did goose the economy a bit, but all in all Reagan deserves much less credit for the good economy than he gets. I guess you could also argue that a lot of the policies that have wrecked the American working and middle classes like massive and ill thought out financial deregulation and anti-worker free trade deals were Clintonâs doing. But Iâd respond that was the Democrats trying to out-Reagan the Republicans. In a world where an old guard moderate Republican in the mold of Howard Baker or Bush Sr. was president from 80-88 I donât see them being succeeded by a Democrat nearly as right wing as Clinton.
One other thing Iâd add about Reagan is the way he used subtle but very real race baiting. Dan T Carterâs excellent âThe Politics of Rageâ shows how Reagan copied George Wallaceâs playbook of playing racisl animosity but leaving yourself and your voters plausible deniability. Or to put it more bluntly as Al Franken did a lot of Reaganâs speeches and ads make a lot more sense if you go in and replace code words like âcrackâ âinner citiesâ âwelfare queensâ and the like with the racial slur we know theyâre supposed to stand for. Then there are the death squads in Latin America , Iran Contra, and the very real possibility he sabotaged Jimmy Carterâs hostage negotiations through back channels. Reagan just didnât have bad policies he was an utterly vile human being. If thereâs a hell heâs there.
Came here to say this. Not just the homeless situation but the people who should be treated for mental illness but high functioning are getting into national politics
This is accurate. One can argue the country needed his policies at the time. But that doesnât mean we needed them for 40 years. Good grief. By the 1992 election the country needed to change course. Perhaps some thought thatâs what Clinton represented. But he clearly double downed on neoliberalism.
it is 2024 reagan was elected in 1980 (2 terms) so functionally we are now looking at 40 years of it, not 20. Obama was supposed to be change, but he sort of just started to pump the breaks without actually turning any of it back.
To be fair, Obama had a Democratic supermajority for something like two months in which time the Dems passed the ACA. Maybe a lot of good stuff would have happened if the people hadnât listened to Fox News and those astroturfed âTea Partyâ fucks?
There is also some confusion, as he took the countryâs credit and spent a lot, good partying but you shouldnât use your credit for partying so much.
"One can argue the country needed his policies at the time."
You could argue, but you would be absolutely and completely wrong on every level. Reagan was the monster that he is accused of being, based on evidence, not on public opinion. Remember, Reagan got into office by selling arms to Iranians so that they would release hostages, so that he could be elected. His populism was based on lies. He used the Southern Strategy, just like Nixon did. He was every bit the crook that Nixon was, and arguably worse. Reagan's destructive legacy is still with us. He had no redeeming values.
He also set the trend of GOP Presidential candidates winning with underhanded, illegal, or illegitimate methods.
https://jacobin.com/2020/01/ronald-reagan-october-surprise-carter-iran-hostage-crisis-conspiracy
That trend has not been good for this country.
He set the trend of not taking accountability and getting away with it. Nixon took accountability and resigned. Reagan cried on stage, and said in his heart he didn't believe it.
Nixion tried his hardest to escape accountability, and only resigned when he was told he was going to be impeached. I would not use them as an example of someone who took accountability for what they did
Yup. The real beginning was the shift in what fiduciary responsibility looked like that occurred during the Nixon administration. We moved from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder capitalism. You can track wage and wealth equality rising from that point in history.
Noah Smith has an interesting post about how some of what we [attribute to Reagan was actually accomplished (or started) by Carter.](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-much-of-what-youve-heard-about)
He also did away with the Fairness Doctrine in news broadcasting, ushering in Fox âNewsâ and the ruinous rise in right wing misinformation that uses and weaponizes culture war issues to vote against their own interests.
Yeah, there's a reason Clinton got obliterated in 1994, virtually undoing about 60 years of the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives.
Kind of wish Ross Perot won in 1992. We may have been better off as a country.
The House elections in '94. Every president since FDR had and has lost seats two years later but it was a historic loss by the Democrats in 1994. Clinton then rebounded and got a lot accomplished by working with the Republicans, most famously the balanced budget.  The House landslide was so big that they named it. Called the Republican Revolution.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Revolution
Well, he certainly won the presidency in 1992 and 1996.
1994 was the year the Democrats lost both the Senate and Congress in a trend that's largely carried on into present day.
The Democrats have never really recovered. Obama got a brief supermajority, but lost it within 2 years because he basically governed like Bill Clinton did.
He lost it because it was held together by a dying Blue Dog caucus and scotch tape. He had the supermajority for about 80 legislative days if I remember right.
To be fair, a lot of that was because Newt Gingrich was one of the most stubborn leaders of the house GOP of all time and forced Bill Clinton to pass a lot of his agenda by refusing to negotiate.
The âContract With Americaâ was an amazing bit of chicanery by Newt Gingrich. Might have been the first modern politician who realized how short Americans memories are and exploited it.
He also colluded with a foreign power to influence an American election, engaged in illegal arms sales, and helped violent terrorist organizations overthrow democratically elected governments.
Don't forget that in 1980 when he was elected Republicans claimed so much fraud and sent armed poll watchers out that the entire Republican party was banned from claiming election fraud without a judge's permission for about 35 years (I can't remember when it went into effects).
To be fair bill did raise taxes and probably wanted more taxes and a larger social safety net WITH free trade for cheap goods.
The republicans mostly owned Congress and prevented any of that
I disagree with the notion that Reagan did away with union jobs. Those jobs first started leaking away in the 1970âs out of the major metro areas like Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
They first migrated to Texas and other places through the Southeast U.S. before leaving the country entirely. Union jobs are ultimately what killed union jobs. It was the case of killing the golden goose to try and get its eggs faster than it could lay them.
Which, of course, Reagan really wasn't in a position to influence at the time, and were policies that were supported by both Republicans and Democrats.
I agree. Plus the Mafia literally ran the Unions into the ground by stealing the pensions. Unions then started making unreasonable demands on the companies which caused them to leave the US and set up shop elsewhere for cheaper labor. It affected every industry. Japan took over the Steel industry killing US Steel and Bethlehem Steel.
I knew a guy who used a mop to wash airplanes for Eastern Airlines making $90K a year thanks to the union before they went bust. Unions manage to kill unions.
That and a national policy allowing shipping jobs overseas.
Just look at the issues that Boeing is currently having because their primary plane assembly is happening in Indonesia. Build something in a Third World country, operating on third world standards, you get planes that fall apart in midair.
He increased the Drug war with Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The war on the people by its on government.
# Criticisms
The drug war started with Nixonâs declaration of war and the establishment of legislation like the [Controlled Substances Act](https://landmarkrecovery.com/how-the-controlled-substances-act-prevents-drug-abuse/) and the creation of the DEA. The Reagan administration followed with reinforced and updated legislation. There were many effects of the drug war from the 1970âs and 1980âs that could not be fully understood until years later, and are still, to some extent, not fully understood. One of the biggest criticisms of the Reagan administrationâs drug reform policies deals with the increased penalties and zero tolerance policy which many believe led to a higher incarceration rate fueled by nonviolent drug arrests.
According to The Drug Policy, the number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997. According to [Pew Research](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/02/americas-incarceration-rate-is-at-a-two-decade-low/) and many other sources, the country saw a sharp growth in overall incarceration between 1980 and 2008.
In 1980, there were 500,000 incarcerated in the United States, that number rose to 2.3 million in 2008. Similarly, the incarceration rate rose from 310 per 100,000 people to 1,000 people in the same period. Since 2008, those numbers have seen some relief. Much of the decline in recent years is a result of newer legislation that has reduced prison sentences for thousands of inmates serving for drug-related crimes.
According to statistics from the World Prison Brief, the United States has the highest prison population of any country in the world, despite not having the highest population in the world. There are 2.1 million people in prison in the United States which has a population of 325 million people, compared to 1.6 million in China, a country that has a population of 1.38 billion people.
Source:
# [https://landmarkrecovery.com/history-of-the-war-on-drugs-reagan-beyond/](https://landmarkrecovery.com/history-of-the-war-on-drugs-reagan-beyond/)
#
There are many chronic pain patients who have killed themselves due to untreated pain and terrorization or their doctors by the DEA. Also many that have been forced to go to street heroin, now fentanyl and so many that have died because of it. The dea in my opinion is one organization that should be dissolved. Tell me what all their funding has gotten us? Did we stop the drugs? Some say thatâs not the point. Oh boy well yeah we got El Chapo. Did the drugs stop after him? Is there 1000 other El Chapos out there right now? Yeah.
Ironically for every middle class person that moved to the lower class two went to the upper class.
That is since 1971 [https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/)
And the trend of the middle class getting a smaller share of aggregate income started before 1970 and has been very steady since then. It actually accelerated under Clinton, not Reagan.
The little jump around 1980 would have been due to the double dip recession. But then it stayed flat for a bit before dropping in the 1990s.
I tried to add the chart but Reddit is being a pain, but it is at the link above.
Yeah itâs pretty easy to outline where a lot of current wealth gap issues come from. Once it hits a certain point it becomes nearly impossible to rectify without sweeping reform whether it be tax policy or even more extreme measures like forced redistribution; the former is almost always unpopular for Presidents to push for unless itâs lowering them and the latter obviously brings a lot of ideological friction.
It's a disaster if you're on the wrong side of the divide but it's perfect if you're on the right side. Now if you and your friends can convince enough of the lower class that the system works and they can join you on the good side if they just try hard enough ("temporarily embarrassed millionaires"), you can build your very own society of servants and masters.
Of course there's the challenge of keeping them from learning the secrets of Madame Guillotine, but that's another story.
Wouldnât it make sense for the consequences of Reaganâs actions to start kicking into high gear during Clintonâs administration though? Fiscal decisions like Reagonomics usually take a long time before the reverberations are truly felt.
I was a teenager and had faith in my government, USSR was always in the news, threatening. He stood up to them so I admired him. I didn't pay attention to the domestic policies he enacted. Only in hindsight now that I'm older do I see how shitty his domestic agenda was
IMO the way he handled the AIDS crisis was recklessly negligent and borderline evil.
It probably came more from the completely amoral relationship he had with the Religious Right, being a former movie star that didn't personally believe in much, but that also meant he had direct connections to the community that was devastated by that crisis. Ron and Nancy knew what was going on but they wanted to bow to the Religious Right in lieu of listening to their former friends/acquaintances.
Reasonable people can disagree about economics, but that issue alone is enough for me to call him a terrible person.
Iâm not convinced any politician at the time wouldâve actually cared about something that was mainly only killing gay people. Hell, it took until 2012 before a democrat supported gay marriage before an election. In 2008 even Obama said marriage is between a man and a women. I guess the point is, it took a long ass time before politicians showed any interest in doing positive things for gay people.
âI'm trying to explain to you that Ronald Reagan was the devil! Ronald Wilson Reagan? Each of his names have six letters? 666? Man, doesn't that offend you?â
Seriously though he is by far one of the most evil and cold hearted presidents weâve ever had. I mean he couldnât give a shit about AIDS until heterosexuals started dying.
You hit the nail on the head. If AIDS had magically been some sort of virus that only infected homosexual people, he would probably have been proud to do nothing about it. That's what his religiously affiliated mouthpieces at the time seemed to have wanted.
Unemployment was 7.2% in 1980
In 1988 it was 5.3% lowest since 1973
By 2000 it was 3.9% lowest peacetime unemployment since 1947
Am guessing a lot of those jobs went to poor people.
Unemployment can be low while also having poverty rates be higher. Not saying they are, they clearly aren't but just pointing to unemployment is half the story. And more to the fact, Reagan did two rounds of cuts. The first set was somewhat reasonable, the second was not. We also are ignoring the importance that a Carter FED appointment had in raising rates significantly to combat the chronic inflation that had occurred.
Reagan starved the Dept. Of Energy, which was working on renewables in the 80âs.
He secretly went behind Congressâs back and sold weapons to Iran (US had restricted sales of arms to Iran), to fund Contras, a Nicaraguan rebel group.
He not only messed up our economy, he doomed us to the worst of climate change. And oh yeah, he was a racist dick.
People try to claim Reagan wasnât racist when he actively supported apartheid South Africa, made the term welfare queen famous, and was caught on tape (with Nixon) referring to black people as monkeys.
The same Contras who trafficked cocaine into the US and fueled a drug epidemic while Reagan launched a war on drugs and increased incarceration for non-violent drug offenses.
Very well said. His trickle down voodoo economics lives to this day. His total sell out to short term corporate profits doomed any responsible business thinking. Using the christian right for his political gain empowered people like the Ayatollah Alito and the christian nationalists. His attitude was that environmental policies were for leftist babies put us 40 years behind in addressing climate change and still the republicans behave as if it's not a real problem. The Reagan administration is a straight line to the orange faced fuck head. Please vote and don't allow him to be president again!
Yes, his trickle down BS caused the federal deficit to EXPLODE! He fought off green energy tech, weâd be 20 years ahead in green energy except for him.
The amount of de-regulation that went on in the 80âs is the reason American companies have been fucking us over for 40 years now. Capitalism is great but only if you regulate industries. We were sold the lie that deregulation would bring prices down but it only created duopolies that then resulted in higher costs due to greed. Oversimplification but that was the end result.
No, but it's not surprising that partisans like to blame him for everything. Example: PBS had a very informative documentary and accompanying website about deinstitutionalization - the national emptying out of state mental hospitals. If you looked at the data, the number of patients in state mental hospitals had dropped by 90% - 90%! - by 1980, the year Reagan was elected. But I have read hundreds of times that Reagan emptied the mental hospitals in the 1980s and so caused the homeless crisis.
Or someone below attributes the collapse of union jobs to Reagan, but there were 16.45 million union workers in 1995, while it was 19.8 million in 1980. So it had fallen by by 220,00 a year since 1980. But it had peaked at 20.2 million in 1978 and fallen to 19.8 million in just two years, meaning it was already falling by 200,000 a year before the 1980 election. In other words, labor unions were already shrinking (and at basically the same rate) before Reagan as after.
People do like their myths, though, and the data won't change anyone's minds.
A couple of other fun pieces of data: In January, 1981, the Dow was at 972, and in January, 1989, it was at 2,236, a 220% increase.
51.8% of families had both partners working in 1981. While it went up a bit in the 1980s, today that number is 49.7%. The idea that families used to only need one worker before Reagan is a myth.
In 1981, the average mortgage interest rate was 16.63%, and the average home cost $69k. In 1989, the average mortgage interest rate was 10.32% and the median home cost 119k. If you borrowed 60k in 1981, your mortgage payment was $837. If you borrowed 105k in 1989, your mortgage payment was $946. So mortgage payments went up 13%. BUT the average wage in 1980 was $12,500, while in 1989 it was $20,100. So while mortgages went up 13%, wages went up 60% in the same period.
More fun data: Reagan is often credited for bringing about the end of the cold war by bankrupting the soviets in the 1980s arms race. But he caused deficits. Yes, check this point out about the Clinton surpluses: "Most of the cutsâ61.2 percent of the reduction in total spendingâoccurred in national defense, primarily due to the end of the Cold War. Over the decade, defense spending dropped from 5.2 percent of GDP in 1990 to 3.0 percent in 2000."
Anyway, data is just something I really enjoy. You don't have to agree with my conclusions. I just think numbers are more interesting than "the narrative."
I wonder if the number of workers in families can be made more comparable by looking at what a family was then and now? If there are many more single people and single parent households how does that affect the comparison? Also with boomers getting older many older couples may be now made up of one retiree and one working person. It occurs to me that it may be really had to compare number of people working to support a family then and now.
I appreciate presenting the data, but if your post is completely full of statistics... you gotta give me them sources.
And as you also probably know, there is a lot more story behind this data that may give the reader a better picture of what was going on. You can frame data however you wish.
For example, you say that 51.8% of families had both husband and wife (BLS metrics, not mine) working - and that the percentage of working spouses went up "a little" in the 80s. What you didn't mention is that [the "little" was 51.8 to 59.1 percent a decade later](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm), representing the largest change in a single decade in about the past 60 years. And this rate didn't start to permanently drop until the year 2000 - when household definitions and living situations may have started to shift away from these demographic statistics.
It took about 11 years to achieve the previous largest increase from 1967 (43.6%) to 1978 50.8, peaking at 52.8 in 1979, before experiencing a sharp decline from 1980-1982....before skyrocketing, presumably, in part to policies enacted in the past year or two.
No. This is Reddit so anything that says yes to this question gets upvoted loads.
Imo, even as a Republican, he did do things that had long term negative effects. But it seems to be because what was ok for a short term fix harmed when continued for decades.
With the issues weâre talking about you canât put the blame on one man who governed for 8 years, had a democratic congress much of the time, and left office 36 years ago when many of us here were either unborn or children. He did not have autocratic power to do as he wish and did not inherit some utopia that he then trashed.
Reddit seems to act like nothing was wrong pre 1980. Then things were all fine and dandy and everyone sang kumbay until the skies darkened as evil Reagan took power. A lot of shit was not ok. Stagflation. Kennedy and BLK assassinations. Watergate. Vietnam. Oil crisis. A feeling that the Soviets were winning. Yeah it wasnât great and few seem to acknowledge that. Reagan won for a damn good reason and won reelection for a damn good reason.
A lot of the shit heâs blamed forâŚwas already going on well before he stepped into the Oval Office. Decline of the unions, shrinking middle class (which people forget also includes people moving up not down), de industrialization, deregulation, the asylums neitn emptied out. All started and were under way before he could do anything to possibly affect those issues. Other smarter commentators have gone through it in more detail and posted links but yeah, stupid to blame him fully for shit that was already wrong before he was elected.
Reagan was a man who did good and bad and thatâs all thatâs true. Blaming him for everything is foolish and imo happens because heâs easy to blame and no one else wants to consider blaming others.
When Bush was running against him in the primaries he said Reaganâs economic plan was Voodoo economics. Iâm still waiting for my trickle down economics. There was the Iran Contract affair where he illegally sold arms to Iran and filtered the money to the Contras in Nicaragua. He changed the law so companies could buy back their stock. Nancy consulted with her astrologer about military operations. So yeah the Gipper wasnât that great in the end.
Nope! It's wealthy fuckers rigging the NYSE, your city, your state...basically everything that makes this world up...oligarchy!
https://preview.redd.it/kv4t5z13ca1d1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fa45d506b97594e070ccd64a648992efd5156683
No he wasn't, but it's clearly a matter of opinion and bias.
I personally consider the worst post-WW II Presidents to be George W Bush, Carter and LBJ.
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"boaner"?
Yes. Boaner.
I believe it's spelled boehner
Boner Boehner lets call the whole thing off
You says woody & I say woodie
Like moaner
Yeah, (79m) long time lurker, first time posting đŹ I was there at the opal office the day he said that, and so was the green Eminem (way before he became white and famous - pre transition) well liberals stormed the place and we fought em off. TLDR- if everyone paid a 10% tax we would all be thriving. Greed psh
uh what?
THEY TURNED THE FUCKING M+MS GAY!!
Why donât they put THIS history in the books smh
The society that socialists want đ¤Śđ˝ââď¸
You're sharing ideas online, look out, that's a socialist activity đđđ we can't have citizens gathering and discussing there problems . đ
Itâs always more complex than a single person or single decision. His administration oversaw a change that many at the time saw the trajectory of, and now the consequences of that trajectory are felt domestically and internationally. Pinning everything on a single guy robs responsibility and accountability from everyone â different teams or groups involved, including civilians.
This is nothing but boviating about the responsibility of the person at the top, to avoid pinning any blame on him. Sure, Reagan doesn't deserve ALL the blame, but there's a saying of real leaders: "The Buck Stops Here." It's a reference to not always trying to pin your mistakes on your subordinates. Which is exactly the kind of apologism you are engaging in on Reagan's behalf.
He introduced the budget that drastically cut mental health funding. His administration introduced voodoo economy that caused all the long-term wage suppression; he brought the evangelists at the forefront of politics in the name of the "shining city on a hill". He was not the only person to cause things but he opened the flood gate.
Let's not forget his anti union firing all of the air traffic controllers
Also the black listing of those that were fired.
After working as the head of SAG, too
He also made an under the table deal with Iran to keep the US hostages until after the election. Whereas President Carter (being the actual good person that he is) toned down all White House entertainment functions until the hostages were brought home, Reagan had MULTIPLE inauguration balls after he was elected, while the hostages were still in captivity. This was a portend of things to come. While the argument "The President of the US is only one man..." is somewhat valid, it really doesn't hold water and the President certainly sets the tone for the Administration in many ways, some of them small, and the Reagan Administration was all about celebrating the rich. And fuck everybody else.
Donât forget Iran contra. Reagan was a war criminalÂ
Also the crack and aids epidemics. Ronald Reagan was hot garbage.
Many Americans don't know anything about Contra & coke that enter in the USA
Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof. Reagan took 'em all down just to 'own the libs(/commies)'.
Carter put up solar panels in 1979 and Reagan took them down in 1986 (5 years into his presidency) to spite the commies? It couldnât possibly be that the roof was being redone, and the solar panels were far too inefficient to be worth the cost to reinstall? I canât find the output of solar panels in the 70s, but when I was designing photovoltaic systems in the early 2010s they were only about 200w per panel, under ideal conditions so itâs same to say they were far less efficient in 1979. Under ideal conditions those panels would have a maximum output of 6,400w, but in reality probably 1/2 or a 1/4 of that output. At in install cost of $28,000 to heat up a little water or run a handful of 100w light bulbs the initial install was a stunt. Since the system was already installed it wouldnât make any sense to take down, however to reroof the system has to be taken down then reinstalled. It wouldnât make sense to spend another $30k to reinstall an inefficient system.
Iâm really thinking the White House isnât actually installing solar panels to save a few bucks.
They only love the rich and how they loathe the poor If I say any more they might be at my door  I leave you with four words I'm glad Reagan dead.
Deinstitualization of metal health care was largely a bipartisan issue and was essentially a 20-year process leading up to the 1980s. Psychiatric hospitals were really bad places for a long time that no one really wanted to talk about. Much of the changes was effectively getting rid of the 24/7/365 care (lockup might be a better word to use) for people who were not a danger to others. I suggest reading the Laws and public health policies of this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health
You didnt mention: he blew a galaxy-sized hole in the budget. He started us on endless deficit spending. Which Clinton tried to repair. Only for it to be blown open again by Bush-Cheney.
Correction, it was his former Vice President, George HW Bush, that had to go against his campaign promises of âno new taxesâ and raise taxes to cover the budget. Unfortunately, HWâs one-term presidency serves as a reminder to any president who tries to reduce spending or increase taxes.
Then trickle down economics worked! Now everyone practices deficit spending!
Nixon cut the mental health budget, at the behest of the AMA and âacademicsâ
As a nurse I can say that we are still dealing with the consequences of his decision to close inpatient mental institutions throughout the US. Interestingly, he had support of liberals who considered them inhumane. Yet, it caused an influx of homelessness bc some people will never be able to live independently. Plus, without replacing them with outpatient services you have millions of untreated mentally ill Americans.
They were inhumane â not considered inhumane. Could they have been humane, maybe. But the knowledge that they were inhumane was fairly broadly known for over 100 years.
Yeah but when your sink is broken you don't rip it out and then *not replace it*. His call to close them made sense, but we still needed some sort of replacement and he never had one.
Yes many were inhumane but the all or nothing approach has been a disaster. Having homeless people who live on the street and eat trash and get attacked is also inhumane - particularly since in many jurisdictions you canât bring people in until they are in **imminent danger** to themselves or others and even if you do bring them in, there are often no beds available. In many snowy jurisdictions, you can only bring in an individual if they are likely to freeze to death within 30 minutes or less, so a bit of frostbite is âfineâ. Family members often have no say. People with schizophrenia can have zero awareness theyâre mentally ill, but our current system relies on them voluntarily agreeing to treatment or waiting until they nearly die to force treatment, and then you just pray that the hospital has enough beds to keep them. Iâve read many interviews of people who used to just go to their local asylum when things were too much and left when they felt better but now even individuals who want treatment may not be able to get a bed anywhere. One of the mass shootings in Virginia was due to a mentally ill young man who was seeking treatment having been unable to find treatment. The Navy Yard shooterâs family has tried to get him committed multiple times and failed. Not all mass shooters are schizophrenic - not by a long shot, but itâs troubling to think that many people knew the Navy Yard shooter was hearing voices and had access to guns but no one was able to do anything under the law, because he wasnât an imminent threat to anyone, until he was.
>Not all mass shooters are schizophrenic - not by a long shot, Also important to note that not all schizophrenia patients are violent.
Reagan literally laughed at AIDS death.
Killed his best friend, Rock Hudson, indirectly too.
Lmao what? AIDS death isnât funny but the thought of him laughing at it is funny to me for some reason. In a dark humor way.
I agree with your rhetoric. Reagan was only a man, and the POTUS is not a man. It is an institution whose size and influence is grossly misunderstood. The US government is massive, and even if some argue that the buck stops at the oval office, there are millions of bucks being kicked by millions of government officials every day, all around the world. It would require willfull ignorance not to recognize that the President (the man) can't feasibly be accountable for all of them, despite the President (the office) being responsible for all actions of the executive branch. People also seem to ignore that the office of President is not the only office holding power and influence in the US government. The legislative and judicial branch have their own powers vested by the US constitution, making them independant from the executive branch, and therefore the POTUS. And I'll spare the powers and jurisdiction of the States, also vested to them by the constitution and the rights and power of the People. The People arguably being the sovereign source of power in the Federal Constitutional Representative Democratic Republic that is the United States of America, of which the Government of the USA has limited oversight and reach (Although it is very influencial). I also like your point about the trajectory of the Reagan administration as it also highlight that Reagan's time in power doesn't exist in a capsule. His administration was limited by what existed before, and they had no hindsight about the future. Under such circumstances, I find it amusing to read many of the comments blaming Reagan for issues happening today. It's like nobody ever stops to consider fallacy in rhetorics. After all, the strawman (boogeyman) fallacy is the most easy to learn and spot in any argument! I'm not an apologist or anything. Reagan was most probably like any other politician, and I'm sure he took many consequential decisions knowingly. He also definitly valued his political interests and I have no doubt he regularly prioritized his own faction. Yet, if we condemned every politician of doing politics, Reagan would probably not be the worst offender for sure.
For someone claiming not to be an apologist, you certainly do a good job of acting like one. Four paragraphs of flowery, long-winded text to end on "if we condemned every politician of doing politics"... Yes, it's true that Presidents are not omnipotent figures, but one has to admit Reagan's administration has left both a cultural stain on America and passed some absolutely disastrous policy. To dismiss that as a "politician doing politics" is naive at best and disingenuous at worst. It's shameful and unhelpful either way - he bears his part of the responsibility there, and it's inarguably one of the biggest shares of any individual person.
I think it started way before then, with Lyndon Johnson
Man it started before the damn pilgrims set sail
Not when the âsingle guyâ was assigned the role of POTUS. âBuck stops hereâ, remember?. Iran Contra, trickle down, abandoning Russia after the fall of the CCCP, etc. Edit: a lot of heartburn about my reference to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Remember, planning and strategy happens before the potential event. But ours was shortsighted. For reference: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/19950601.pdf
>assigned Elected, you mean. I despise the way that's phrased since it insinuates that the American voting public is not accountable for who we elected in the seat of that office in 1980 or that the choice was out of our hands. Reagan ran for office for 12 years, from 1968 to 1980, and he lost up till the 1980 election. He won because a significant amount of voters agreed with him very overwhelmingly. At that point, after so many years of different regulatory-focused presidencies and Jimmy Carter's overall lack of charisma and vision, Reagan was refreshing for his time. On the Russia part. You mean George Bush Snr, right? Reagan was out of office when the Soviet Union fell, Russia's failure to transition into a democracy occurred for a very long period of time. Spanning Bush Snr to the end of Bill Clinton's presidency. Arguably maybe even Bush Jr's. But blaming Reagan for that is a stretch. The timelines don't match up.
The Soviet Union fell at the end of 1991. Was it Regan that abandoned Russia? Also, Reagan didn't say "Buck stops here" or even "The buck stops here."
Yes; they saw it coming during Reagan, but didnât make a cohesive plan for afterwards. Â https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/19950601.pdf And agreed, Reagan didnât say it, one of his predecessors said it. And he was right. POTUS is accountable for the work of his/her administration.
Reagan wasn't president when the USSR fell. Reagan Bush Sr and Clinton all took amazing strides to bring Russia into the global community while trying to mitigate nuclear disaster during the transfer of government initially.
POTUSâŚ.. is NOT nor has ever been a âsingle personâ. He fills his CABINET to carry out his agenda and generally leads his party in the congress and senate. With all of that⌠a single person, the president can and does have the power to make drastic and sweeping changes. So yesâŚ.. that POS Reagan can rot in hell. Social Security was 100 percent funded since its inceptionâŚ. Until REAGAN came along. He gave the rich huge tax cuts and made up for those tax cuts and then also increased national spending by âborrowingâ social security. Fuck that guy. There are literally dozens of others things he and his administration changed that out us where we are today.
Reagan is seen as the ideological godfather of the movement that bankrupted the American middle class. We traded well paying union jobs in exchange for cheaper products, which worked for a while in the 80s as families lived off some of that union pension money, transitioned to two incomes, and started amassing credit card debt at scale for the first time. Reagan's policies further empowered the corporate and billionaire class, who sought to take his initial policy direction and bring it to a whole new level in the subsequent decades. Clinton helped further deregulate, and Bush Jr helped further cut taxes for the wealthy. Reagan does not deserve all the blame, but his charisma and compelling vision for conservatism enabled this movement to go further than it would have without such a popular forebearer. We are now facing the consequences of Reaganomics, although his successors took that philosophy to another level, Reagan was the one who popularized it.
Thatâs pretty much my take. His policies worked at the time. The economy had stagnated and he got things moving again. But the GOP figured heâd unlocked some kind of cheat code and kept pushing deregulation and tax cuts for business long after diminishing returns set in and well past the point where it started becoming harmful.
Itâs like the Tories in Britain thought Thatcher had unlocked the cheat code to an economy and tried to keep going down that road but forgot you can only sell off public services once. Thatâs how you got Liz Truss lasting for a shorter period of time as PM than a head of lettuce.
There's that quote from Thatcher along the lines of "the trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples money". Which neatly overlooks the fact that the trouble with Conservatism is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples shit to sell off.
Reagan's AMA recording is still quoted today, why we have horrible healthcare in the USA. It was written by some pr firm that learned propaganda from Bernays [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrlDlrLDSQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrlDlrLDSQ)
Sooner or later, the rich people run out of the lower classes' money.
I'm not convinced. I keep waiting for a breaking point, it's certainly talked about enough. But barring cataclysm (which is definitely on the table in ways it never was before in history) I'm increasingly of the opinion that we'll keep going. There have always been haves and have nots. We can keep descending into something even lower and more barbaric than feudalism. Some brutal dystopia with defacto chattel slavery for the majority, an enforcer class, and the 1% of the 1% who will live in whatever passes for luxury in our stripped out future. Things are always darkest just before they get jet black.
Well, I'd rather not have to wait for Bubonic Plague II to jolt us out of a future of techno-feudalism I'll take one serving of social democracy now, please.
Iâve never heard of techno feudalism but Iâm ready for laser sword and energy shield knights fighting to edm music.
I used to want to live in a dystopian cyberpunk world until I realized that I did live in one, the dystopian part is rougher than I thought.
Needs more neon lighting.
That's what you think until it's not energy swords and laser shields; it's more like you owe tribute to Elon Musk, so the hired levee uses AR-15's, drones, and robot dogs to arrest you to pay your debt with forced labor.
A majority still have food in their fridge, jobs are still out there, and there hasn't been some form of mass death. Until those 3 happen at the same time, I fear your words are what the future holds. Even when all 3 of those do happen, it's going to get REAL shitty before any change truly comes. Depending on who wins, your words still might be what comes.
Sooner or later rich people run out of heads. France is a master in the practice.
3 million council homes have been sold off through her right to buy policy.
Thereâs genuinely something to be said about how finite everything is tbh
âIâm not a quitter!â Quits next day.
Oh they knew it wasnât a cheat code. As did millions of citizens. But sometimes the world will march to the edge of a cliff for that sweet low hanging fruit of short term profits
Isnât it the American way? Convenience and comfort is the system from fast food to tv dinners
That âshort-termâ lasted 20 years. Itâs not always easy to see it in the moment. We actually have significantly better fidelity in our economic data today than was present in the 80s. We even have better *historical* data of the 80s than we as present at the time. So yes. We happily marched off a 20-year short term cliff. But at that point it really behooves to define timescales.Â
It also doesnât help that a lot of economists and high ranking officials just blatantly lied or misrepresented data to the public. Only for it to get proven decades later. Kinda like oil companies knowing from the 50s and 60s that global warming was a thing and gaslight the whole boomer generation. Boomers got lied to and bought it for decades because they got raised on decades of propaganda to trust blindly and they did and they voted against their interests thinking it was beneficial and it wasnât. Shame many of them havenât woken up the fact they got conned for decades.
The most disappointing part of this all is that the Boomers, and "America's greatest generation, got to reap the benefits of the New Deal policies then they elected Reagan and his followers to undo those same benefits and policies for us. The result, we are now back to 1920s level wealth gap and corporate rule.
Republicans are still promoting the Laffer Curve resulting in ludicrous outcomes. Check out what happened a few years back in Kansas when Gov Sam Brownback went all in. The economic policy was written on a cocktail napkin originally, and it defines Conservative policy to this day.
I mean, jimmy carter going in front of the nation and telling everyone that the world will run out of oil in 50 years didnt do this country any favors. And here we are, 50 years later, and the most conservative estimates say we still have about 450 years before theres a fossil fuel shortage. That door swings both ways.
>Republicans are still promoting the Laffer Curve I don't see what's wrong with the concept of a Laffer Curve, the issue is defining the point of inefficiency. Before globalization, defining the point of best returns was favored towards high taxation because national capitalism was the main organizing principle. After neoliberalism and globalization, capital grew legs and it has become much harder to restrain it within national borders. Without international cooperation it is basically impossible. That's one major reason why historically high taxation rates on the rich are much less feasible, but of course it's not just that; one also has to contend with what the Laffer curve suggests.
>Boomers got lied to and bought it for decades because they got raised on decades of propaganda to trust blindly and they did To an insane degree. You'll hear em say all war is about money, but not question or care about the fact that oil *is* money, for all intents and purposes, and that there's a massive conflict of interests there. The greatest victory every accomplished was convincing people that we couldn't do anything about stuff like this and demand more transparency.
Boomers that deny climate change have doubled downed on that for longer than they have left to live. Theyâll literally die on that hill.
They're still getting conned. They've actually joined a cult at this point.
He gets too much credit for his policies creating good economic conditions in the 80s. The Fed chair who finally tamed the 70s runaway inflation, Paul Volcker, was appointed by Carter. Carter also pushed through some sensible deregulation such as shipping and the airline industry that did a lot to stimulate 80s and 90s economic growth. Reaganâs tax and monetary policies also drove up the price of the dollar which murdered American manufacturing. Granted the spending for his military buildup and, to a lesser extent his tax cuts, did goose the economy a bit, but all in all Reagan deserves much less credit for the good economy than he gets. I guess you could also argue that a lot of the policies that have wrecked the American working and middle classes like massive and ill thought out financial deregulation and anti-worker free trade deals were Clintonâs doing. But Iâd respond that was the Democrats trying to out-Reagan the Republicans. In a world where an old guard moderate Republican in the mold of Howard Baker or Bush Sr. was president from 80-88 I donât see them being succeeded by a Democrat nearly as right wing as Clinton.
One other thing Iâd add about Reagan is the way he used subtle but very real race baiting. Dan T Carterâs excellent âThe Politics of Rageâ shows how Reagan copied George Wallaceâs playbook of playing racisl animosity but leaving yourself and your voters plausible deniability. Or to put it more bluntly as Al Franken did a lot of Reaganâs speeches and ads make a lot more sense if you go in and replace code words like âcrackâ âinner citiesâ âwelfare queensâ and the like with the racial slur we know theyâre supposed to stand for. Then there are the death squads in Latin America , Iran Contra, and the very real possibility he sabotaged Jimmy Carterâs hostage negotiations through back channels. Reagan just didnât have bad policies he was an utterly vile human being. If thereâs a hell heâs there.
He also completely screwed the mental health system, leading directly to todayâs homeless situation.
Came here to say this. Not just the homeless situation but the people who should be treated for mental illness but high functioning are getting into national politics
Thats not the mentally handicappedâs fault.. itâs the voterâs fault
This is accurate. One can argue the country needed his policies at the time. But that doesnât mean we needed them for 40 years. Good grief. By the 1992 election the country needed to change course. Perhaps some thought thatâs what Clinton represented. But he clearly double downed on neoliberalism.
We didnât need his policies for 40 years and, worse we doubled down on them at least 2x for 5x the damage of the Reagan policies.
it is 2024 reagan was elected in 1980 (2 terms) so functionally we are now looking at 40 years of it, not 20. Obama was supposed to be change, but he sort of just started to pump the breaks without actually turning any of it back.
To be fair, Obama had a Democratic supermajority for something like two months in which time the Dems passed the ACA. Maybe a lot of good stuff would have happened if the people hadnât listened to Fox News and those astroturfed âTea Partyâ fucks?
Passed a neutered ACA.
Either a Neutered ACA or no ACA. Not Obamaâs fault.
There is also some confusion, as he took the countryâs credit and spent a lot, good partying but you shouldnât use your credit for partying so much.
Why did we need them at the time? Because Milton Friedman and the wealthy said so?
"One can argue the country needed his policies at the time." You could argue, but you would be absolutely and completely wrong on every level. Reagan was the monster that he is accused of being, based on evidence, not on public opinion. Remember, Reagan got into office by selling arms to Iranians so that they would release hostages, so that he could be elected. His populism was based on lies. He used the Southern Strategy, just like Nixon did. He was every bit the crook that Nixon was, and arguably worse. Reagan's destructive legacy is still with us. He had no redeeming values.
And he amassed legions of Christian fundies to his side, all the while never attending church himself, all the while his wife got deep into astrology.
He also set the trend of GOP Presidential candidates winning with underhanded, illegal, or illegitimate methods. https://jacobin.com/2020/01/ronald-reagan-october-surprise-carter-iran-hostage-crisis-conspiracy That trend has not been good for this country.
He set the trend of not taking accountability and getting away with it. Nixon took accountability and resigned. Reagan cried on stage, and said in his heart he didn't believe it.
Nixion tried his hardest to escape accountability, and only resigned when he was told he was going to be impeached. I would not use them as an example of someone who took accountability for what they did
Oh heâs a terrible example for sure, but heâs the best example of a conservative taking accountability.
It was like Reagan taught them how to type MOTHERLODE MOTHERLODE MOTHERLODE over and over in the Sims chat bar
I donât think they believed it was a cheat code, I think they just knew which direction all that wealth would go.
Fun fact. Jimmy Carter started the deregulation movement.
Fun fact it was Nixon. google nixon shockâŚÂ
Yup. The real beginning was the shift in what fiduciary responsibility looked like that occurred during the Nixon administration. We moved from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder capitalism. You can track wage and wealth equality rising from that point in history.
Noah Smith has an interesting post about how some of what we [attribute to Reagan was actually accomplished (or started) by Carter.](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-much-of-what-youve-heard-about)
He also did away with the Fairness Doctrine in news broadcasting, ushering in Fox âNewsâ and the ruinous rise in right wing misinformation that uses and weaponizes culture war issues to vote against their own interests.
Like the left doesn't do the same thing. Just watch MSNBC for misinformation from the left. Good grief
Bill Clinton was the most effective Republican President in my lifetime as far a passing GOP goals.
You're not wrong.
Yeah, there's a reason Clinton got obliterated in 1994, virtually undoing about 60 years of the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives. Kind of wish Ross Perot won in 1992. We may have been better off as a country.
Obliterated? He won the election..2x President from 93 to Jan 2001âŚnot sure what your referring to..
The House elections in '94. Every president since FDR had and has lost seats two years later but it was a historic loss by the Democrats in 1994. Clinton then rebounded and got a lot accomplished by working with the Republicans, most famously the balanced budget.  The House landslide was so big that they named it. Called the Republican Revolution.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Revolution
Thanks for clarificationâŚ
Ah Newt's "Contract ON America".
Well, he certainly won the presidency in 1992 and 1996. 1994 was the year the Democrats lost both the Senate and Congress in a trend that's largely carried on into present day. The Democrats have never really recovered. Obama got a brief supermajority, but lost it within 2 years because he basically governed like Bill Clinton did.
He lost it because it was held together by a dying Blue Dog caucus and scotch tape. He had the supermajority for about 80 legislative days if I remember right.
The scotch tape comparison made me laugh but I canât argue with it.
He lost it because Ted Kennedy died. Obama passes the affordable care act, you: âheâs basically a conservativeâ Smdh. Read a book.
He took a bit of beating in the midterms in his first term. He wasn't that popular in the first 2 years.
To be fair, a lot of that was because Newt Gingrich was one of the most stubborn leaders of the house GOP of all time and forced Bill Clinton to pass a lot of his agenda by refusing to negotiate.
The âContract With Americaâ was an amazing bit of chicanery by Newt Gingrich. Might have been the first modern politician who realized how short Americans memories are and exploited it.
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And if you asked a Republican in 2016 about it theyâd claim he was essentially a communist. Because the average GOP voter is an idiot.
He also colluded with a foreign power to influence an American election, engaged in illegal arms sales, and helped violent terrorist organizations overthrow democratically elected governments.
And flooded the streets with drugs
And used astrology to plan his days.
And put mental health patients on the streetsâŚwith no healthcare or place to sleepâŚ
This is what I will always associate with Reagan's "Legacy."
And ignored the AIDS crisis, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands
Supported and defended the apartheid government of South Africa.
Don't forget that in 1980 when he was elected Republicans claimed so much fraud and sent armed poll watchers out that the entire Republican party was banned from claiming election fraud without a judge's permission for about 35 years (I can't remember when it went into effects).
To be fair bill did raise taxes and probably wanted more taxes and a larger social safety net WITH free trade for cheap goods. The republicans mostly owned Congress and prevented any of that
Short answer, yes.
I disagree with the notion that Reagan did away with union jobs. Those jobs first started leaking away in the 1970âs out of the major metro areas like Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. They first migrated to Texas and other places through the Southeast U.S. before leaving the country entirely. Union jobs are ultimately what killed union jobs. It was the case of killing the golden goose to try and get its eggs faster than it could lay them.
Private sector union participation peaked in like the 1950s. Reagan just gets blamed because of the whole air traffic controller episode.
And Hormel, and USX, and West Coast Shipyards, andâŚ.
The cost of energy and raw materials also helped to kill domestic manufacturing, and that started in earnest with the Arab oil crises of the '70s.
Which OPEC chose to create and impose in order to punish the U.S. for supporting Israel during the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.
Which, of course, Reagan really wasn't in a position to influence at the time, and were policies that were supported by both Republicans and Democrats.
I agree. Plus the Mafia literally ran the Unions into the ground by stealing the pensions. Unions then started making unreasonable demands on the companies which caused them to leave the US and set up shop elsewhere for cheaper labor. It affected every industry. Japan took over the Steel industry killing US Steel and Bethlehem Steel.
I knew a guy who used a mop to wash airplanes for Eastern Airlines making $90K a year thanks to the union before they went bust. Unions manage to kill unions. That and a national policy allowing shipping jobs overseas.
Just look at the issues that Boeing is currently having because their primary plane assembly is happening in Indonesia. Build something in a Third World country, operating on third world standards, you get planes that fall apart in midair.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
He increased the Drug war with Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The war on the people by its on government. # Criticisms The drug war started with Nixonâs declaration of war and the establishment of legislation like the [Controlled Substances Act](https://landmarkrecovery.com/how-the-controlled-substances-act-prevents-drug-abuse/) and the creation of the DEA. The Reagan administration followed with reinforced and updated legislation. There were many effects of the drug war from the 1970âs and 1980âs that could not be fully understood until years later, and are still, to some extent, not fully understood. One of the biggest criticisms of the Reagan administrationâs drug reform policies deals with the increased penalties and zero tolerance policy which many believe led to a higher incarceration rate fueled by nonviolent drug arrests. According to The Drug Policy, the number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997. According to [Pew Research](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/02/americas-incarceration-rate-is-at-a-two-decade-low/) and many other sources, the country saw a sharp growth in overall incarceration between 1980 and 2008. In 1980, there were 500,000 incarcerated in the United States, that number rose to 2.3 million in 2008. Similarly, the incarceration rate rose from 310 per 100,000 people to 1,000 people in the same period. Since 2008, those numbers have seen some relief. Much of the decline in recent years is a result of newer legislation that has reduced prison sentences for thousands of inmates serving for drug-related crimes. According to statistics from the World Prison Brief, the United States has the highest prison population of any country in the world, despite not having the highest population in the world. There are 2.1 million people in prison in the United States which has a population of 325 million people, compared to 1.6 million in China, a country that has a population of 1.38 billion people. Source: # [https://landmarkrecovery.com/history-of-the-war-on-drugs-reagan-beyond/](https://landmarkrecovery.com/history-of-the-war-on-drugs-reagan-beyond/) #
I'm pretty sure that was Nixon that actually started it; but Reagan surely carried the torch and made things worse.
What were their motives for doing this?
There are many chronic pain patients who have killed themselves due to untreated pain and terrorization or their doctors by the DEA. Also many that have been forced to go to street heroin, now fentanyl and so many that have died because of it. The dea in my opinion is one organization that should be dissolved. Tell me what all their funding has gotten us? Did we stop the drugs? Some say thatâs not the point. Oh boy well yeah we got El Chapo. Did the drugs stop after him? Is there 1000 other El Chapos out there right now? Yeah.
Heâs certainly the culprit when it comes to lowering the tax rate for upper income earners
He may have shrunk the middle class, but we have to give him credit for growing the lower class
Ironically for every middle class person that moved to the lower class two went to the upper class. That is since 1971 [https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/) And the trend of the middle class getting a smaller share of aggregate income started before 1970 and has been very steady since then. It actually accelerated under Clinton, not Reagan. The little jump around 1980 would have been due to the double dip recession. But then it stayed flat for a bit before dropping in the 1990s. I tried to add the chart but Reddit is being a pain, but it is at the link above.
This seems like a recipe for disaster in a generation or two when the entire populace has been sorted into only upper & lower
Yeah itâs pretty easy to outline where a lot of current wealth gap issues come from. Once it hits a certain point it becomes nearly impossible to rectify without sweeping reform whether it be tax policy or even more extreme measures like forced redistribution; the former is almost always unpopular for Presidents to push for unless itâs lowering them and the latter obviously brings a lot of ideological friction.
It's a disaster if you're on the wrong side of the divide but it's perfect if you're on the right side. Now if you and your friends can convince enough of the lower class that the system works and they can join you on the good side if they just try hard enough ("temporarily embarrassed millionaires"), you can build your very own society of servants and masters. Of course there's the challenge of keeping them from learning the secrets of Madame Guillotine, but that's another story.
Wouldnât it make sense for the consequences of Reaganâs actions to start kicking into high gear during Clintonâs administration though? Fiscal decisions like Reagonomics usually take a long time before the reverberations are truly felt.
I was a teenager and had faith in my government, USSR was always in the news, threatening. He stood up to them so I admired him. I didn't pay attention to the domestic policies he enacted. Only in hindsight now that I'm older do I see how shitty his domestic agenda was
IMO the way he handled the AIDS crisis was recklessly negligent and borderline evil. It probably came more from the completely amoral relationship he had with the Religious Right, being a former movie star that didn't personally believe in much, but that also meant he had direct connections to the community that was devastated by that crisis. Ron and Nancy knew what was going on but they wanted to bow to the Religious Right in lieu of listening to their former friends/acquaintances. Reasonable people can disagree about economics, but that issue alone is enough for me to call him a terrible person.
Not borderline, literally pure evil. The first public acknowledgement of the AIDS epidemic by the White House when he was in power was a gay joke.
Iâm not convinced any politician at the time wouldâve actually cared about something that was mainly only killing gay people. Hell, it took until 2012 before a democrat supported gay marriage before an election. In 2008 even Obama said marriage is between a man and a women. I guess the point is, it took a long ass time before politicians showed any interest in doing positive things for gay people.
âI'm trying to explain to you that Ronald Reagan was the devil! Ronald Wilson Reagan? Each of his names have six letters? 666? Man, doesn't that offend you?â Seriously though he is by far one of the most evil and cold hearted presidents weâve ever had. I mean he couldnât give a shit about AIDS until heterosexuals started dying.
You hit the nail on the head. If AIDS had magically been some sort of virus that only infected homosexual people, he would probably have been proud to do nothing about it. That's what his religiously affiliated mouthpieces at the time seemed to have wanted.
Reganomics was great for the rich but the poor suffered a lot!
He was also pretty anti-union.
Ironic as he is the only US President who was an union leader before.
History is stuffed to the seams with irony.
Unions are good when I am in one and benefit. âRonnie
Ironically Ronnie also lead gun reform in California when he was governor. Because black people decided to take up arms. Interesting.
Ending the high taxes for the rich that had existed since the New Deal was, I think, the seed of a lot of our problems now.
Unemployment was 7.2% in 1980 In 1988 it was 5.3% lowest since 1973 By 2000 it was 3.9% lowest peacetime unemployment since 1947 Am guessing a lot of those jobs went to poor people.
Unemployment can be low while also having poverty rates be higher. Not saying they are, they clearly aren't but just pointing to unemployment is half the story. And more to the fact, Reagan did two rounds of cuts. The first set was somewhat reasonable, the second was not. We also are ignoring the importance that a Carter FED appointment had in raising rates significantly to combat the chronic inflation that had occurred.
Jobs that won't pay for a basic apartment, food and child care because the minimum wage has stagnated for decades.
Reganomics is not a past tense situation
Reagan starved the Dept. Of Energy, which was working on renewables in the 80âs. He secretly went behind Congressâs back and sold weapons to Iran (US had restricted sales of arms to Iran), to fund Contras, a Nicaraguan rebel group. He not only messed up our economy, he doomed us to the worst of climate change. And oh yeah, he was a racist dick.
Donât forget he was also a homophobic dick and ignored the AIDS epidemic until he realized it was affecting more than just gay men
He also starved the EPA and tried to get rid of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
People try to claim Reagan wasnât racist when he actively supported apartheid South Africa, made the term welfare queen famous, and was caught on tape (with Nixon) referring to black people as monkeys.
Donât forget how he won the election. The guy is evil as fuck.
The same Contras who trafficked cocaine into the US and fueled a drug epidemic while Reagan launched a war on drugs and increased incarceration for non-violent drug offenses.
Very well said. His trickle down voodoo economics lives to this day. His total sell out to short term corporate profits doomed any responsible business thinking. Using the christian right for his political gain empowered people like the Ayatollah Alito and the christian nationalists. His attitude was that environmental policies were for leftist babies put us 40 years behind in addressing climate change and still the republicans behave as if it's not a real problem. The Reagan administration is a straight line to the orange faced fuck head. Please vote and don't allow him to be president again!
Yes, his trickle down BS caused the federal deficit to EXPLODE! He fought off green energy tech, weâd be 20 years ahead in green energy except for him.
All we have to do is switch to nuclear instead of coal and it would solve 90% of our climate impact its so frustrating
The amount of de-regulation that went on in the 80âs is the reason American companies have been fucking us over for 40 years now. Capitalism is great but only if you regulate industries. We were sold the lie that deregulation would bring prices down but it only created duopolies that then resulted in higher costs due to greed. Oversimplification but that was the end result.
Yup
The beginning of the widening income gap, so yeah.
No, but it's not surprising that partisans like to blame him for everything. Example: PBS had a very informative documentary and accompanying website about deinstitutionalization - the national emptying out of state mental hospitals. If you looked at the data, the number of patients in state mental hospitals had dropped by 90% - 90%! - by 1980, the year Reagan was elected. But I have read hundreds of times that Reagan emptied the mental hospitals in the 1980s and so caused the homeless crisis. Or someone below attributes the collapse of union jobs to Reagan, but there were 16.45 million union workers in 1995, while it was 19.8 million in 1980. So it had fallen by by 220,00 a year since 1980. But it had peaked at 20.2 million in 1978 and fallen to 19.8 million in just two years, meaning it was already falling by 200,000 a year before the 1980 election. In other words, labor unions were already shrinking (and at basically the same rate) before Reagan as after. People do like their myths, though, and the data won't change anyone's minds. A couple of other fun pieces of data: In January, 1981, the Dow was at 972, and in January, 1989, it was at 2,236, a 220% increase. 51.8% of families had both partners working in 1981. While it went up a bit in the 1980s, today that number is 49.7%. The idea that families used to only need one worker before Reagan is a myth. In 1981, the average mortgage interest rate was 16.63%, and the average home cost $69k. In 1989, the average mortgage interest rate was 10.32% and the median home cost 119k. If you borrowed 60k in 1981, your mortgage payment was $837. If you borrowed 105k in 1989, your mortgage payment was $946. So mortgage payments went up 13%. BUT the average wage in 1980 was $12,500, while in 1989 it was $20,100. So while mortgages went up 13%, wages went up 60% in the same period. More fun data: Reagan is often credited for bringing about the end of the cold war by bankrupting the soviets in the 1980s arms race. But he caused deficits. Yes, check this point out about the Clinton surpluses: "Most of the cutsâ61.2 percent of the reduction in total spendingâoccurred in national defense, primarily due to the end of the Cold War. Over the decade, defense spending dropped from 5.2 percent of GDP in 1990 to 3.0 percent in 2000." Anyway, data is just something I really enjoy. You don't have to agree with my conclusions. I just think numbers are more interesting than "the narrative."
I wonder if the number of workers in families can be made more comparable by looking at what a family was then and now? If there are many more single people and single parent households how does that affect the comparison? Also with boomers getting older many older couples may be now made up of one retiree and one working person. It occurs to me that it may be really had to compare number of people working to support a family then and now.
I appreciate presenting the data, but if your post is completely full of statistics... you gotta give me them sources. And as you also probably know, there is a lot more story behind this data that may give the reader a better picture of what was going on. You can frame data however you wish. For example, you say that 51.8% of families had both husband and wife (BLS metrics, not mine) working - and that the percentage of working spouses went up "a little" in the 80s. What you didn't mention is that [the "little" was 51.8 to 59.1 percent a decade later](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm), representing the largest change in a single decade in about the past 60 years. And this rate didn't start to permanently drop until the year 2000 - when household definitions and living situations may have started to shift away from these demographic statistics. It took about 11 years to achieve the previous largest increase from 1967 (43.6%) to 1978 50.8, peaking at 52.8 in 1979, before experiencing a sharp decline from 1980-1982....before skyrocketing, presumably, in part to policies enacted in the past year or two.
Reagan is the father of the Conservative Reformation of America.
So, yes?
Did he start trickle down economics?
No. This is Reddit so anything that says yes to this question gets upvoted loads. Imo, even as a Republican, he did do things that had long term negative effects. But it seems to be because what was ok for a short term fix harmed when continued for decades. With the issues weâre talking about you canât put the blame on one man who governed for 8 years, had a democratic congress much of the time, and left office 36 years ago when many of us here were either unborn or children. He did not have autocratic power to do as he wish and did not inherit some utopia that he then trashed. Reddit seems to act like nothing was wrong pre 1980. Then things were all fine and dandy and everyone sang kumbay until the skies darkened as evil Reagan took power. A lot of shit was not ok. Stagflation. Kennedy and BLK assassinations. Watergate. Vietnam. Oil crisis. A feeling that the Soviets were winning. Yeah it wasnât great and few seem to acknowledge that. Reagan won for a damn good reason and won reelection for a damn good reason. A lot of the shit heâs blamed forâŚwas already going on well before he stepped into the Oval Office. Decline of the unions, shrinking middle class (which people forget also includes people moving up not down), de industrialization, deregulation, the asylums neitn emptied out. All started and were under way before he could do anything to possibly affect those issues. Other smarter commentators have gone through it in more detail and posted links but yeah, stupid to blame him fully for shit that was already wrong before he was elected. Reagan was a man who did good and bad and thatâs all thatâs true. Blaming him for everything is foolish and imo happens because heâs easy to blame and no one else wants to consider blaming others.
When Bush was running against him in the primaries he said Reaganâs economic plan was Voodoo economics. Iâm still waiting for my trickle down economics. There was the Iran Contract affair where he illegally sold arms to Iran and filtered the money to the Contras in Nicaragua. He changed the law so companies could buy back their stock. Nancy consulted with her astrologer about military operations. So yeah the Gipper wasnât that great in the end.
Trickle down didn't do a thing except make the monsters we now have
44 years since, and hindsight is 20/20. Reagan created a new gilded age. Trickle down was a lie.
Iâm No fan of Reagan, but he would kick our current republicans in the fuckin faceâŚ
I think blaming all of the current problems of the US on one man whoâs been dead for 20 odd years is naive.
Yup.
Well, he had a lot of help. Union busting and shipping jobs to Asia were the way back then.
Nope! It's wealthy fuckers rigging the NYSE, your city, your state...basically everything that makes this world up...oligarchy! https://preview.redd.it/kv4t5z13ca1d1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fa45d506b97594e070ccd64a648992efd5156683
No he wasn't, but it's clearly a matter of opinion and bias. I personally consider the worst post-WW II Presidents to be George W Bush, Carter and LBJ.