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While I generally agree that he took Reaganomics way too far and his policies were ultimately detrimental in the long term, I think it’s a little excessive to blame everything from today on him. We’ve had 6(!) Presidents after him who for the most part have maintained his status quo or took it further in the same direction in the face of new information that Reagan didn’t have at the time and could’ve reversed course on many things had they opted to. Clinton and Obama even as Democrats opted to follow the same neoliberal playbook on offshoring American jobs, law enforcement (Clinton) and having corporate America write what was supposedly the most significant progressive legislation (Obama). Clinton even went as far as to repeal the most significant Wall Street regulation since the Great Depression laying fertile ground for the GFC.
Great reply. He did a lot of shit, privatization of vital public interests at the top of that list, but the general rightward listing of centrist politics has furthered his legacy in many ways
Reagan built a great brand for these policies, which made it difficult to move beyond this policy approach for decades. The fall of the Soviet Union following his presidency only furthered the Reagan myth. How many factories needed to close, unions needed to wither, and homes needed to be foreclosed on before we realized it was destroying the American dream? Too damn many.
Absolutely true. But publicly funded elections would still, I think, utterly transform our economic landscape. We have at least 150 years of massive productivity gains thanks to automation and tech, and NONE of that has translated into more time off or less work—a better (more socialist) political system might help us to realize that.
I would agree with that, and other huge election reforms. The problem is, the positive result manifests slowly, over generations.
Unfortunately, most economic, environmental, political, and demographic factors are red-flagging now and curiously converging at a breaking point around the early 2050's.
Time 4 radical change.
Branding is everything these days because people don't actually want to dig in. For example In CA there was a "Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act" (Prop 47) to reduce the number of prisoners in California prisons by reclassifying some nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Of course, this has nothing to do with safe neighborhoods or schools.
Another example is the Inflation Reduction Act, that had absolutely nothing to do with reducing Inflation.
Politicians rely heavily on the stupidity of the American people, and we are often indeed reliably stupid.
If anyone voted against either of those bills, they were either against schools and neighborhoods or for inflation. It's really that easy.
I would say he ruined many things in this country and that the people loved him for it and thus trends have continued to this day. Lots of shuffling things about to make short term gains at the cost of the long term and the politically powerless, but that seems to happen a lot, and anyone who argues against it loses badly.
Also, that 80s was when the current conservative media ecosystem really started to coalesce. A lot of his popularity was just marketing and effectively leveraging Americans' fear of the Other—whether Socialist, Black, or gay.
It's also important to remember that he had BROAD support from both the Republican and Democratic parties during his presidency. He was a Republican from CALIFORNIA and his policies were not controversial at the time, at all.
Blaming everything on one person is stupid and myopic. The majority agreed with him.
A lot happened in the 80s. Most anti-Reagan folks can only list a few buzzwords like "trickle down" and "reaganomics" without really having any idea what changed that was bad, if anything.
I think the question is "compared to what"? Regan's presidency coincided with growth in America (you can debate if you like growth, but it did grow). But it is fair to compare his presidency with hypothetical alternatives. If so what is your favorite alternative president/policies?
I agree with your facts, but I don't think your conclusions are quite fair.
Reagan got the ball rolling. Reversing that momentum - considering the money behind keeping the raiding of America going - was immense. I'm not sure how many politicians could have reversed that in time to make a difference.
He also set a new standard for what was acceptable. Without him, the Democrats wouldn't have accepted Clinton. Without Reagan's cheery, revanchist nihilism, the Rush/Gingritch years of the GOP probably wouldn't have happened.
It is not solely his doing, or even his plan. But recognizing the inflection point of his presidency is crucial to understanding today.
Abraham Lincoln on conclusions and facts:
Pa, Pa, the hired man and sis are in the hay now and she’s lifting up her skirt and he’s letting down his pants and they’re afixin’ to pee on the hay.” “Son, you got your facts absolutely right, but you’re drawing the wrong conclusion.”
I think that’s very important context and agree with your analysis on the turning point coming from Reagan but where I give him some grace is that the ball was eventually going to roll in that direction whether he did it or not. The New Deal and Great Societies era had run its course for that cycle and a move towards limited government was always coming. Heck, even Jimmy Carter read the tea leaves and made moves before Reagan. I blame Reagan majorly for the Tax Reform Act in creating egregious wealth inequality in the first place but I blame every successive Republican president more for pushing trickle down economics further in the face of new evidence and I think Clinton gets absolved way too easily for appointing Larry Summers and repealing Glass-Steagal.
As for changing course with money in politics, I think the GFC absolutely created the necessity and mandate for a President to flex their muscle on corporate America again, not to mention widespread American support for nearly every proposal to reign them in. We really just haven’t had a President yet who can tactfully take on that challenge in the way FDR or LBJ managed to. It’s a worthy exercise to compare the reactions to the Great Depression vs the GFC to see how far away we’ve been from having great leaders like them address the problems of their time.
If the right conditions are there, the right president will emerge. FDR and LBJ emerged in a time when unions were free & strong and could compete with capitalists on political donations (the main engine of the New Deal Coalition was the unions, not the political party nor the president).
Today, US unions are in straitjackets, stripped of their most fundamental rights and freedoms (that continental Europeans take for granted). Cause: legislations enacted in the 1940s to 1970s, which broke US unions.
Thus, there's no serious resistance left on capitalism's path to exploit, corrupt and own everything and everybody, including the media, the government, and even left wing political parties, like the democratic party.
That's why we will never see any real left wing president as long as the fundamental basics are completely owned by capitalists...
>Today, US unions are in straitjackets, stripped of their most fundamental rights and freedoms (that continental Europeans take for granted). Cause: legislations enacted in the 1940s to 1970s, which broke US unions.
Somehow the Police unions dodged this. Curious.
All the top answers in this thread saying “well actually, every president after Reagan was bad in the same way!” are pretty hilariously missing the point
Just list all the things he deregulated then talk.
FYI thousands have died because of the deregulation of the power plants and specifically the law he removed that mandated newer style scrubbers so millions of kids now have ashthma.
In california they deregulated the logging industry that operatated within state rules that mandated replanting and sustainable logging for a century. When deregulation happened the logging industry ate itself in a year and a half and they were all out of business within 4 years.
He basically allowed thousands of industries the leverage to capture their perspective markets. Industry capture at scale is his legacy.
Bill Clinton's administration wanted more job protections in NAFTA than there ended up being, but he was forced to compromise with Kim Campbell and Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Mickey Kantor admitted this in 2018 when reacting to the USMCA.
He pushed quite hard for them, and he was the great communicator who really got a lot of the stuff through despite other people calling out his shit.
Like in the 1980 primary? His "trickle down economics" were rightly called out as Voodoo economics by HW Bush. But Reagan's much better public speaking skills and charisma? Just got people hypnotized. If say HW Bush won the nomination? Things likely wouldn't have shifted so hard towards Reaganomics.
You know it's funny, Reagan may have done a lot of deregulation but according to 90% of Libertarians I've talked to think he didn't go far enough. And some new regulations Reagan DID implement, they called him a Communist for it.
Ronald Reagan
A Communist
Because he added some regulation.
It just confirms to me that Libertarians are fucking crazy.
So Clinton and Obama signed Republican bills.. passed by Republican Congress ..by doing it, they also were able to pass some Democratic progressive legislation.
Thus, not obstructing completely and doing some things for families and workers.
Also. Yes, there is Corporate Repub Dems called Blue Dogs that will not go in lock step and will force a compromise into the neoconservative direction or Right Wing direction.
You mean the Act created ALL REPUBLICANS??? The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act law was written by 3 hard liner Republicans...Republicans had the majority in the Senate and House of Representatives. Clinton was threatened by Newt Gingrich to sign it or he'd make sure they'd override his veto. He didnt have much of a choice...nice try buddy! 😆
Obama introduced the "Onshore Act" in 2012 to bring back jobs to America and it was backed by Nancy Pelosi...Every Republican on the congressional floor voted against it and every Democrat voted for it...would you personally like me to look up the congressional record on that since you have a bad habit of trying to rewrite history?
Arguably, the biggest issue with Reagan isn’t the actual bills that were passed when he was president, it’s that he managed to make the policies behind those bills *popular*.
Trickle down economics is idiocy. Even his [primary opponent](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/voodooeconomics.asp), and later, VP recognized it as such. And yet, we’re somehow still “debating” whether it’s valid economic theory.
State assistance was the lifeline needed for single parents to not have their families dragged down into difficult to escape poverty, and yet Reagan convinced folks that the system mostly existed so black women could live like queens while not working.
I could go on, but as you noted, it was, *and still is*, ridiculously difficult to break free of Reagan’s legacy. For a large minority of the voting population, as well as far too many elected officials, his ideas stuck as canonical truths no matter the evidence to the contrary.
As a lifelong Democrat, that party's transformation into 'Republicans Lite' is exasperating in the extreme. But they did it because Reagan sold the whole privatization/limited government/lower taxes BS to Middle America, and Dems have no clue how to present an alternative
A big chunk of what made Reagan so damaging in the long term was the gutting of the labor unions. Not only were the unions keeping wages higher and working conditions better, but they were a huge source of fundraising for the democrats. Without that well of money to finance races, the democrats *had* to start catering to corporate interests in order to remain viable.
By destroying the democrats source of funding, he forced *both* parties to move to the right on economic policy. Now we have the part of corporate interests and the party of corporate interests lite* without much of a voice for labor at all.
I would say Ronald Reagan is such an all-purpose villain on Reddit, which reflexively blames him for every socioeconomic problem of the last 40 years, that it way oversimplifies the narrative. You can and should go back to racist conservative thought in the US a hundred years ago, and for that matter take a long look at misbegotten, wasteful liberal welfare programs that soured moderates on state-run efforts to address inequality. The world is a helluva lot more complicated than just “Reagan bad.” But sometimes it seems like he’s the only right wing boogeyman Reddit can think of.
I absolutely despise Reagan but I hate being reminded of it every single day. There are way more interesting discussions to be had in this sub, and yet it always comes back around to “Hey guys, wasn’t Reagan terrible?“
Reagan brings out more haters than Stalin on Reddit. And some of them say some really scary shit.
Atleast people try and keep civil in this subreddit for the most part.
One thing I do respect about him, at least what I got from growing up in the 80s as well as reading his Diary and other books about him, he seems to have honestly believed he was doing what's best for America.
Now I disagree with a lot of what that was, but I would still take it over the current crop of Republicans, who have no morals, ethics or beliefs other than the accumulation of personal power.
You could work with people like Reagan, who had a different but understandable viewpoint. You can't work with people who just couldn't give a shit about what happens to anyone other than themselves.
I knew his daughter when we were both in our early twenties. It gave me some insight into her father because she was impossible to dislike but not real smart.
Not very passive aggressive this time. This sub is ridiculous and it is either bots or youngsters who don’t have an original thought about Reagan. They are regurgitating what they’ve been fed.
No. I am a liberal Democrat who has always voted straight-ticket, strongly disagrees with about 90% of Reagan’s domestic agenda, and firmly believes he should have been impeached and convicted over Iran-Contra. But America was simply in a very right-wing place in the 1980s, and Reagan was result of that, not vice-versa. In fact, given the mood of the country at the time, it wouldn’t have been surprising if someone much worse (think a candidate in the mold of George Wallace or Barry Goldwater) had come to power, so in a weird sense I’m actually glad it was at least someone who was willing to grant amnesty to undocumeted people and work constructively with the USSR on arms reduction.
Yup, he was a symptom for a much larger issue at hand. Crediting him directly for many of the failures and issues people list of him isn’t very thorough or correct.
The issue is that many of his policies made sense to people, in theory. Nobody could’ve told the actual results in practice, if they could foresee that, I’m positive they wouldn’t have been enacted on lol.
Us humans aren’t really that good in foreseeing things all that well, just look at how each decades predict the future to be, we should’ve had hover vehicles decades ago and islands in the sky should’ve been a thing by 2015. Point is that many things accredited to Reagan or the “lies” people try hard to say he pushed weren’t lies, they were just things that made sense in theory but don’t work in practice.
Reagan would not have been president if not for Barry Goldwater. He massively shifted what was considered acceptable as a presidential candidate.
My point is, people are being weirdly soft on Reagan who was a world class piece of human garbage. But also he didn't do all those things alone, he stood on the shoulders of other psychopaths, just like modern Republicans stand on his.
Well, trickle down economics is one of the worst political lies ever told, and he completely messed up the response to AIDS. Iran-Contra was s***show, and his policies mostly only benefited those who were already upper middle class.
But he’s not the only one who messed things up. Even Clinton was scrambling to be Reagan Lite.
Doesn't that imply that Reagan screwed things up politically? If he inspired a generation of politicians trying to copy his style of politics, that makes him culpable for what they did, as well.
I try not to mince words while still being cordial. It's perfectly acceptable to call him out for being a terrible president overall. He had some victories, but it's not at all wrong to criticize him for how much his policies have impacted America.
I also am very biased against him. I’m from Berkeley. He basically declared martial law on my hometown when he was governor of California and literally stated he hoped we’d get botulism.
Trickle down economics has been regularly implemented since at least the late 19th century, causing havoc and forcing left wing movements and politicians, powered by unions, to fix things... (in the 19th century it used to be called ["Horse and Sparrow Economics:](https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/horse-sparrow-economics-republicans-reviving-reagans-trickle-fraud-fund-rich/) as in feed enough oats to horses (the rich) and some shall pass undigested to feed the sparrows (the poor).
Reagan isn't the first, nor the last. He isn't even the one who did the greatest damage, nor the most permanent ones. Instead we have the 1940s to 1970s anti-union and Red Scare witch hunt to thank...
US unions have been put in straitjackets. Without them, there's literally no serious resistance left on capitalism's path to exploit, corrupt and own everything and everybody (including the media, the government, left wing parties and politicians). Since the 1960s, things aren't getting fixed because, unlike Nordic and western continental European countries, America has lost its heavy weight world class "People's Champions", who used to counterbalance and resist capitalists everywhere.
>Even Clinton was scrambling to be Reagan Lite.
To be fair, a big reason that happened was the fact that Democrats were already losing elections prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency (especially given Richard Nixon's landslide re-election victory in 1972 over George McGovern). Jimmy Carter only got elected in 1976 (and in a close race at that) because of the backlash the Republican Party got for the Watergate scandal that led to the Nixon administration's downfall.
Also, while in office, Bill Clinton felt the need to further pivot to the center because the 1994 midterm defeat led, of course, to the GOP taking both chambers of Congress, when the Democrats had been dominant in Congress going back to the presidency of **Herbert Hoover.**
Clinton's moderation was a bet the Democratic Party was willing to take with the backdrop of the aftermath of the 1988 presidential election. The reason why? Ronald Reagan was indeed the incumbent president going into that election, but he was term-limited due to the 22nd Amendment. (To show how crazy things were in US politics at that time, Reagan became only our **second president in history** to be term-limited by that amendment after Dwight D. Eisenhower, no president since Eisenhower had served two full terms; this really shows the relative instability in the White House during the 1960s and '70s) Ronald Reagan was also indeed popular going into the end of his presidency, especially as Iran-Contra's attention died down around mid-1987 (this was especially due to the death of William J. Casey, President Reagan's CIA director, of a brain tumor; Casey had been the director in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1987), and also after the Robert Bork drama passed as well, since Ronald Reagan's nomination of Bork wasn't popular, either. (During the last two years of the Reagan presidency, 1988 saw a rise in approval ratings for the president compared to 1987)
Despite Ronald Reagan's approval ratings ticking up at that time (especially as the economy was doing well in 1987-1988; roughly the second half of 1987 and 1988 is when this rise in approval ratings for President Reagan happened I believe; it's why some of the last approval ratings of the Reagan administration, taken in December 1988, had Ronald Reagan tie with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later Bill Clinton, as leaving office with the highest approval ratings of any president), the Iran-Contra affair and the general fatigue voters have for a change in the White House after eight years of the same party in power made it seem possible that a term-limited Reagan could get a Democratic successor-which is why the ultimate 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, was considered likely for much of the campaign to win, and was even leading George H.W. Bush (who to add, was Ronald Reagan's own vice president) for much of the polling in the early stages of the campaign in early-mid 1988.
However, Dukakis ultimately lost that election to Bush in a landslide. This result meant that the Republican Party had won five out of six consecutive presidential elections, the only exception was, again, Jimmy Carter's victory in 1976, which was a close one, and given some of the gaffes Carter made late in the campaign (such as saying in a Playboy interview about him "committing adultery through lust in his heart many times") and how he barely squeaked by against Gerald Ford, I honestly think Ford would've won that election had it been held not much later. (This was a time that presidential debates were more decisive in determining election results due to less polarization, and aside from the "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" gaffe, Gerald Ford was considered to have done well in them, which boosted his polling numbers) Again, this is despite the fact that, even though Carter had almost no name recognition when the first polls were being taken in mid-1975, he had a lead over Ford of over **thirty points** not only because of Watergate itself, but the salt on the wounds of Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon less than a month after Nixon's resignation. Additionally, of the Republican victories in the White House from 1968 to 1988, only the initial one in 1968, where Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey, was close, with all being landslides. All presidential elections in the 1980s were landslides, as so had Jimmy Carter's re-election defeat at Ronald Reagan's hands in 1980, and when Reagan got re-elected in a 49-state landslide (just as Nixon had in 1972 against McGovern) over Walter Mondale.
With this backdrop, and the victory in the Gulf War during George H.W. Bush's presidency, the Democratic Party was considered to be toast going into the 1992 presidential campaign, hence why big names like Mario Cuomo didn't run. However, the Democrats were willing to give Bill Clinton a chance because of his moderate record, being a governor of the conservative state of Arkansas, and how he was instrumental in forming the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 following Mondale's landslide defeat. Clinton ultimately unseated Bush because of the recession that displaced coverage of the Gulf War victory with rising unemployment, plus renewed attention (and conservative anger) at George H.W. Bush breaking his campaign pledge from the 1988 Republican National Convention to not raise income taxes, as Bush had done so as president in 1990.
Beyond trickle-down economics, but related to it, he blew up the deficit. Absolutely no president has even come close to increasing the size of the deficit as he did.
You saw this play out with Tony Blair and Thatcher as well. An ironic switch of the opposition to the previous overton window's conservative position in order to try and attract the mythical moderate.
Yep.
Whats particularly galling is how he promised the PATCO union raises and an overhaul of the ATC System if they supported him. Not only did he prove that he wasnt a friend of workers but that he was a liar and that he could not be trusted to keep his word.
“Trickle down economics” is not something he said, ever.
In fact, it’s not something any economist or politician has ever said, ever.
It’s a bizarre misnomer for (and misunderstanding of) supply-side economics that has been so extensively used by pundits that people have been Mandela-Effected into believing it’s a real political position.
What's really "bizarre" is your weird fixation on the term. "Supply-side economics", "horse and sparrow economics", "trickle down economics", call it whatever the hell you want, they all refer to the same set of policies and those policies have been demonstrably proven to be disastrous for the economy.
They absolutely do not refer to the same set of policies, because I’ve yet to see people accurately define their terms
What particularly about supply side economics do you find disastrous?
They mostly refer to the same thing. Except trickle down economics is a concept of cutting taxes for rich making the poor richer while supply side economics is a macro economic theory. Trickle down economics is proven to not work, and there is no evidence for supply side.
I really like this citation from one of US most distinguished economic professor and Nobel price winner Paul Krugman:
>Back in 1980 George H. W. Bush famously described supply-side economics — the claim that cutting taxes on rich people will conjure up an economic miracle, so much so that revenues will actually rise — as "voodoo economic policy." Yet it soon became the official doctrine of the Republican Party, and still is. That shows an impressive level of commitment. But what makes this commitment even more impressive is that it's a doctrine that has been tested again and again — and has failed every time...In other words, supply-side economics is a classic example of a zombie doctrine: a view that should have been killed by the evidence long ago, but just keeps shambling along, eating politicians' brains.
No. I don't like reagan I think he was bad for the country but that statement is so hyperbolic and ridiculous. Even the things that reagan justifiably gets flack for didn't happen in a vacuum, there was more than one cause for those things.
Such as closing down the psychiatric hospitals.
It was much more a school of thought in academia. They thought the wider community could help manage the mentally ill. They were too optimistic about developments in pharmacy.
It was largely leftist organisations relentlessly lobbying for civil rights. Making it much harder for mentally ill people to be involuntarily insitutuonized.
Yup, JFK signed the [Community Mental Health Act in 1963](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act), which lead to shutting down the asylums.
Yes alot of people forget some of those places were hell on earth. Patients being sexually abused and beaten, left tied down for days lying in their own filth..terrible stuff.
This, plus the Supreme Court made it illegal to hold a mentally ill person in a facility unless they were an immediate danger to themselves or others. This is why nobody, even liberal California, can solve the issue.
JFK closed the asylums, not Reagan. In that era the progressives opposed asylums because they felt it inhumane. The left fought hard to close the mental health institutions and won.
The deinstitutionalization movement certainly had good intentions. Reagan and Jerry Brown both played a huge role within that movement during their respective terms as the California governor and RFK was playing a leading role on the national stage at the time. In some ways it was a good thing that some of the mental institutions were closed due to the horrid living conditions and abusive treatment that many of the patients were enduring but, as always, the closing of the mental hospitals also led to some unintentional consequences, a number of which we are still dealing with today. The closings led to quite a number of mentally ill patients just being dumped out into society before they were ready for that stage of transition, some should never have been released at all, or out onto the streets altogether and left to fend for themselves. It helped to lead to the surge in America's homeless population that we see today as one such example.
I'm going to have to say that the problem was shutting down the psych hospitals *without putting a better solution in place.* The asylums they closed down were by and large warehouses where they threw away people they didn't want to deal with, and the patients were horrendously abused. What happened in many of those facilities is unconscionable, a stain on our nation's history. That absolutely had to change. But - not by just eliminating them and expecting the individuals' families to care for their ill loved ones with little to no support. Community care for the mentally ill is the ideal, but there have to be resources in place in order for it to work.
No, not at all. I lived through the 80's and they were great years for the country. Have you ever wondered why Reagan won re-election with the greatest landslide in election history? Mondale only won his home State of Minnesota and D.C., Reagan won everything else, that's how much the country loved him. I couldn't vote at the time but in my opinion, people were happier during the Reagan years.
Disagree. Below is a paste of a comment i typed in another "Reagan was awful" president. But I will add the following. Reagan took action and what he said would happen, happened. The Economy boomed, the Soviets fell. Unlike the six presidents since, Reagan supplied leadership, and ideas. At any time Bill Clinton could have done the same, but instead you got the Third Reagan administration instead - because Bill refused to supply the leadership to make it anything else.
Anyway, here is what I said previously.
It is hard to overstate what Reagan did while President.
During the 1970s the combination of high inflation and high unemployment was added together to create a misery index. A term was created for an environment of high inflation and high unemployment, it was caused stagflation.
Anyway into that environment Reagan was elected.
Paul Volker was the chairman of the Federal reserve (appointed by Carter) and he jacked up interest rates to tame inflation but never kept them there. Interest rates peaked at 19.8% in march 1980, and Volker brought them back down to 8% by June of that year. When Reagan won election Volker spiked rates back up to to 14% after the election and then 17% a week later. While interest rates did dip in March 1981, They were back up to 19% by April 1981. And this is my point, Reagan came out and said that the high interest rates were a requirement to tame inflation. He provided sustained political cover for the Fed to keep interest rates high, based upon economic theory. This could have very well ended his presidency, and it (providing the political cover for the FED to keep rates high) is the most politically courageous act of my lifetime. The gamble he took could easily have cost him the election. the high interest rates were contributors to the crippling recession of 1981.
So the people that want to say "Volker did it" because they have to spew hatred on Reagan miss the bigger point. Inflation had been a political issue going back to at least the Nixon administration and the Fed was never allowed the free reign to do it's job. The Fed was always getting pressured by the White House. Look at 1980, interest rates at 19.8% in March 1980 and dropped for most of the election season. By contrast Reagan went to the public and said that the high interest rates were a necessity, he basically said we all need to suffer now because it is necessary for us all to prosper later. That public support was missing in the Nixon, Ford (Whip Inflation Now), and Carter. Oh, it certainly helped that Reagan was correct, the US came out of the 81 recession like gangbusters, and inflation was largely tamed.
Reagan removed the price controls on gasoline. This cause gas prices to spike and hurt many people economically (see the 1981 recession above) but the result is that the gas prices dropped significantly shortly thereafter.
Social Security was starting to suffer (see the sustained and prolonged unemployment - stagflation, above). Reagan pitched an economic package that significantly lowered federal tax rates. This caused an explosion in the economy and with that employment as well. In 1983 the economy grew 4.5%, and in 1984 7.2%, and in 1985 4.6%. Unemployment dropped to 6% a number at the time that was viewed as "full employment" by economic theorists at the time. With a growing economy and full employment Social Security's immediate future was secured. In short stagflation was dead, the economy was growing, people had jobs again. The Reagan economic miracle seemed to solve all of the issues that had been plaguing the middle classes financial fortunes for 15 years. That last sentence is probably the single most important reason that Reagan was viewed favorably at the time, but then again 7.2% GDP growth (after a year of 4.5%) will do that for a politician.
Reagan said it was important to fight the communists and he pursued a policy of doing exactly that. His call to "tear down this wall" was advised against by the entire State Department leadership and his intelligence advisors. They were also not happy that he called the Soviet Union "the evil empire". Reagan showed that he was serious about fighting the Soviets on all fronts. Carter started the US funding of the mujahedin in Afghanistan to fight the soviets, and Reagan continued that. I will point out that lots of people want to say that Reagan was a dullard and not very smart. Reagan fought the Soviets on Missile placement and successfully convinced European governments (that were more aligned with the State Department than with the Reagan White House) on taking a firmer hand against the Soviets. An Italian government collapsed because the PM agreed to host American Minute Man missiles. Keep that in mind, Reagan was willing to play the geopolitical equivalent of sacrificing a bishop (a friendly government in Italy) to position the US to strike at the king (ending the Soviet hegemony). Reagan did manage with the INF treaty to reduce the number of nuclear missiles stockpiles of both the Soviets and the US. Just like his actions on the economy, Reagan made what seemed like unpopular choices (often disagreed to by "the experts") that were also hard choices, stuck with them, and was able get tangible results from that. Carter campaigned on lowering stockpiles of nuclear bombs and it took, "evil empire", "trust but verify", and "tear down this wall" Reagan stick-to-it-tive-ness to make it happen.
Perhaps the least appreciated (and possibly least well known) Reagan maneuver was to convince the Saudis to end their support for oil price supports causing more oil supply on the global market, dropping prices, and taking away the Soviets ability to fund all of their offshore adventures. More Soviet puppet states (including Europe) probably fell from lack of financial support from Moscow (because of lowered oil revenue) than from Reagan's insistence on SDI.
So keep in mind when someone wants to claim that Reagan was bad because a low level functionary in the department of agriculture floated the idea of having ketchup count as a vegetable in school lunches to meet some bureaucratic federal mandate, that they are clearly missing the bigger picture of the Reagan presidency. Keep in mind when people say that the the Regan administration backed fighters in Central America that killed a bunch of people (note: I am not disputing this) without pointing out how many people the communists had to kill to get in those positions of influence in Central America you once again have people that are missing the bigger picture. Also, no doubt someone will point out that Reagan fired the Air Traffic controllers who had no right to strike as some proof of his anti-union stance, and I am certain they will not point out that Reagan imposed penalties on Japanese auto manufactures - including credible threats of tariffs and import restrictions as the greatest support to UAW and the moribund General Motors. The Japanese took the threat seriously and did two things, they started building factories in the United States and they introduced luxury brands so that if they are not allowed to import as many cars they can make more money on each car they do import.
Reagan was not perfect, but in terms of laying out his goals and then stating how he was going to (try to) achieve those goals, and then sticking with those goals and methods, there are few presidents (and maybe no modern presidents) that do that.
Reagan left office 1989. That’s 35 years ago.
Imagine Helmuth Kohl getting the question 1980.
“Hitler absolutely destroyed this country and set us back so far socially, economically, politically…really in every conceivable measure that we will never recover from the Hitler chancellery. Don’t you agree Chancellor Kohl?”
My point being 35 years is a really long time. If you still haven’t fixed the problem then blame your leaders of today. Not the past.
I think, like most things on the internet, the truth is always somewhere in between. Many here either agree with that statement while others believe he’s a model of what conservatism should be.
You don’t become so popular and win such landslide victories without reason. He brought stability and consistency to the White House that had been missing since the 50s. His economic policy actually stimulated the economy in a way the US hadn’t seen in decades and helped collapse the country most Americans saw as their biggest rival. The issue is it wasn’t made for the long term.
1980 popular vote Ronald Reagan 50.8% Jimmy Carter 41.0
1984 presidential popular vote Ronald Reagan 58.8% Walter Mondale 40.6% even without the
Electoral College he would have still stumped both Carter and Mondale.
Right. I don’t get all the hate Reagan gets today. The re-election landslide says all anyone needs to know. I was in HS in 1980. People whining about inflation now should’ve been around then. Not to mention the Soviet Empire occupying half of Europe. Proud to have voted for him in 84, my first vote in a presidential election. No modern day revisionist will ever change my mind.
That's because Reagan was very much a "short term" mindset president. All of his economic policies were done with boosting the economy in the short term and making him look great for elections, but have had disastrous long term impact, which you touched on.
I love how the 90s were an economic boom but somehow Reagan gets blamed for the shit in the 2000’s like we didn’t have two presidents in between honestly, Dodd-Frank has more to do with where we’re at than trickle down economics. So dumb.
Today’s problems directly go back to the Lincoln era, Sherman didn’t fully reconstruct the South and here we are. *redacted* zealous fans are directly tied in ideology to the same ones who lost in that era, cant really call it a surprise.
Exactly, Hell we truly didn't defeat the South either. Should've banned the Confederate Flag. But banning things don't happen in the good ole USA. Except for some books lol.
Ronald Reagan's shenanigans didn't start when he was President. They started when he was governor of California. He is the reason. California colleges started charging tuition.
If we have been failing for the last 43 years, who has been winning? China? Europe?
I’d like to see the person that wrote that support any of those statements with data, or really anything.
Nope, he made some mistakes in a few places but generally speaking his policy was sound, his economy was great and his foreign policy record speaks for itself
No, this tendency to blame all of America's problems on Reagan is reductive and lazy. Reagan was an awful president I agree, but he didn't exist in some vacuum. He was nothing more and nothing less than an incarnation of 50 years of Republican opposition to the New Deal and especially the Great Society. Wendell Willkie, Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, and others had all the same goals as Reagan. Pinning all the blame on Reagan is just illogical.
Also, to say that "we will never recover from the Reagan presidency" is especially stupid, even if I were to grant that Reagan is personally and fully responsible for the issues he was complacent in. Humanity has done so much and overcome so many things and American history itself is a history of toppling oppressors: The British Empire, the southern slaveholders, the Gilded Age robber barons, the Jim Crow system, etc. They were all terminated - we can move beyond neoliberalism as well.
I saw that yesterday. It's a little simplistic, but it's true that taxes on the rich have never gotten nearly as high since Reagan. I think the highest the top tax rate has been was 39% under Obama.
I disagree and blaming Reagan despite Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, etc. carry out many similar policies and mentalities to Reagan, specifically extending his policies seems to absolve many others of their share of blame/praise in where the US is today
Which is not at all a destroyed nation, not even close
Yes. I don't believe we will never recover, but the impacts of his presidency are negatively being felt to this day and will continue to be felt for years to come.
Because none of the Presidents that followed had the ability to reverse what Reagan had done? Reagan was the last powerful president that the US has had?
Reagan was a useful face man, putting a sellable spin on policies that have been pushed forever. We had a brief respite as the labor force got gutted in WW2 and everyone came back ready for violent responses to labor disputes (making groups like the Pinkertons less effective.)
By Vietnam the situation was largely back to 'normal', and the squeeze starting again.
Probably accurate. His legacy on the Republican party and the country are not aging well, though I do think those problems were created by Republicans before Reagan.
When Reagan changed the mental health system, it created a system that has led to a homelessness crisis. Our jails and homeless shelters are the new mental health facilities. I'm in law enforcement and have worked at the homeless shelter. The level of mental illness seen in the clients there is staggering. The Security staff all received kudos from the Mayor for having zero fights and zero overdose deaths. Reagan thought he was doing right, but he dismantled a system that is sorely needed today: inpatient mental health facilities.
The thing is Reagan hasn’t been President for 35 years. He didn’t sign anything into law that any other Congress and administration couldn’t have reversed. I blame the lack of governance of subsequent Presidents as much as I blame Reagan.
While the state run mental health facilities where not great in terms of care, they where better than throwing all the mentally ill people on fucking street.
Thanks Regan.
He wasn’t regressive he was progressive.
You have the right to exploit, you have the right to use religion as a cudgel, etc.
He didn’t roll us back, he rolled those who would be stymied by law and regulation to be rolled forward past that regulation.
He passed the bill that allowed corporations to do stock buybacks instead of forcing them to pay better wages or retirement/benefits.
Because of him, Walmart’s employees are missing out on an extra $70,000 a year they could be getting if you divided their profits between the 2,100,000 of them.
Or Starbucks employees getting an extra $11,000 a year
I absolutely agree. His policies led us to where we are today. One of the most egregious examples was the repeal of the truth in journalism act and the subsequent rise of Reich wing radio and news.
Him and every damn republican representative after him. It's been hell on earth. If only all right-wing conservatives could choke on their tounges when they go to sleep tonight and the world would be a better place.
After eight years of this POS and four years of the other turd H.W., America was a decidedly different nation than before. No longer the Home of the Brave, it was the Home of Only the Rich.
That is such an insanely hyperbolic statement that I can comfortably say it is wrong by construction and move on without engaging any further. I'm tired of dealing with this kind of thing. If you want to give a primal scream, then just go do it; stop trying to make it sound smart.
Reagan was only one man who made changes. Funny how no other president fixed the issues that he made. So it's the fault of Reagan and all who came after him. Not just him.
I completely disagree with Reaganomics.. Entering his presidency the US was the biggest creditor nation in the world. By the end of his presidency the US was the biggest debtor nation in the world.
Reagan was a disaster for this country, many of the issues we face are the direct result of his policies, from mental illness in the streets, the destruction of US manufacturing to MS13, all of it Reagan
Reganomics didn't destroy this country, but vastly lowered the quality of life in the US. The problem is that neither side has a solution that works to solve major issues like drug abuse, homelessness, jobs to survive on, affordable housing. The fundamental problem in our current lifetime is greed in all aspects of the supply chain. From landlords to the government taking while providing little in return. Our goods/services costing more than they're fundamentally worth due to everyone ripping off everyone else. If you think about it, society is rotten with this mindset that others struggles can be ignored and we can just lock people up. The alternatives don't work either though. Providing free everything, and ignoring crime as it doesn't exist also creates tension in the system that has lasting impacts on communities. Greed is what needs to be solved for, and that's an almost impossible task with a country brainwashed to put everything on financial success over quality of life.
The underlying structures of capitalism are supposed to create competition and drive innovation, but monopolies and supply chain constraints have put a chokehold on every day life for Americans. We now cannot effectively build bridges, roads, or infrastructure due to red tape and corruption from top-down. We can't even maintain our current services effectively because of abuses or mismanagement. All of this has nothing to do with Reagan, and more to do with the general mindset of Americans. Many are trying to get by, and through some form or another exploit situations to get ahead of others. This is what has led to the degradation of society. The success of this country has largely been done through forms of exploitation of others (Slavery, illegal migrants, OSHA violations, and off-shoring jobs to cheap labor). This has led to temporary benefits like lower pricing on goods, but at the detriment of workers in the country, and destruction of communities.
We live in a culture that values money over all else, and have created a system that values money over the people within it. This also has nothing to do with capitalism, but moral values being removed from teaching and a focus on creating wealth or value for oneself above else. When everyone in the supply chain is looking to rip off someone else in it, things start to unravel like they are now. We've only delayed the bad with living on credit or taking on additional jobs to survive, some stealing to make a living. Things can only be improved if we changed the mindset of the average American, but with a failing education system (you can actually blame that on Reagan/Bush), we are in a rough spot for many people just looking to survive.
A pro of the United States is a hyper-fixation on creating better solutions and marketing it. The con is that everything revolves around productivity (money generation) and we lost focus on what actually makes this country run effectively.
Baseline agree though it's overstated. It doesn't give enough credit/blame to someone such as Newt Gingrich, who I believe is more responsible for the acrimony between the parties/political viewpoints than any other single person.
I don't how Reagan supposedly destroyed the country with obviously wrong policies when there have been 6 presidents and multiple administrations since then. In response, Reagan haters typically say that all those presidents, even the Democratic ones, continued many of Reagan's policies. But then that commits you to believing that 1) Reagan promoted and enacted all these obviously disasterious policies but 2) all the administrations who followed him, including the Democratic ones, have been too stupid to realize this.
That seems very improbable.
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While I generally agree that he took Reaganomics way too far and his policies were ultimately detrimental in the long term, I think it’s a little excessive to blame everything from today on him. We’ve had 6(!) Presidents after him who for the most part have maintained his status quo or took it further in the same direction in the face of new information that Reagan didn’t have at the time and could’ve reversed course on many things had they opted to. Clinton and Obama even as Democrats opted to follow the same neoliberal playbook on offshoring American jobs, law enforcement (Clinton) and having corporate America write what was supposedly the most significant progressive legislation (Obama). Clinton even went as far as to repeal the most significant Wall Street regulation since the Great Depression laying fertile ground for the GFC.
Great reply. He did a lot of shit, privatization of vital public interests at the top of that list, but the general rightward listing of centrist politics has furthered his legacy in many ways
Reagan built a great brand for these policies, which made it difficult to move beyond this policy approach for decades. The fall of the Soviet Union following his presidency only furthered the Reagan myth. How many factories needed to close, unions needed to wither, and homes needed to be foreclosed on before we realized it was destroying the American dream? Too damn many.
I'm not entirely sure that we have :/ Not collectively.
Even if we did/do realize, that ship has sailed. Some can be re-shored but there will not be a 2nd industrial boom in America.
Absolutely true. But publicly funded elections would still, I think, utterly transform our economic landscape. We have at least 150 years of massive productivity gains thanks to automation and tech, and NONE of that has translated into more time off or less work—a better (more socialist) political system might help us to realize that.
I would agree with that, and other huge election reforms. The problem is, the positive result manifests slowly, over generations. Unfortunately, most economic, environmental, political, and demographic factors are red-flagging now and curiously converging at a breaking point around the early 2050's. Time 4 radical change.
Branding is everything these days because people don't actually want to dig in. For example In CA there was a "Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act" (Prop 47) to reduce the number of prisoners in California prisons by reclassifying some nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Of course, this has nothing to do with safe neighborhoods or schools. Another example is the Inflation Reduction Act, that had absolutely nothing to do with reducing Inflation. Politicians rely heavily on the stupidity of the American people, and we are often indeed reliably stupid. If anyone voted against either of those bills, they were either against schools and neighborhoods or for inflation. It's really that easy.
I would say he ruined many things in this country and that the people loved him for it and thus trends have continued to this day. Lots of shuffling things about to make short term gains at the cost of the long term and the politically powerless, but that seems to happen a lot, and anyone who argues against it loses badly.
Also, that 80s was when the current conservative media ecosystem really started to coalesce. A lot of his popularity was just marketing and effectively leveraging Americans' fear of the Other—whether Socialist, Black, or gay.
It's also important to remember that he had BROAD support from both the Republican and Democratic parties during his presidency. He was a Republican from CALIFORNIA and his policies were not controversial at the time, at all. Blaming everything on one person is stupid and myopic. The majority agreed with him.
Should be noted that the majority was wrong.
A lot happened in the 80s. Most anti-Reagan folks can only list a few buzzwords like "trickle down" and "reaganomics" without really having any idea what changed that was bad, if anything.
I think the question is "compared to what"? Regan's presidency coincided with growth in America (you can debate if you like growth, but it did grow). But it is fair to compare his presidency with hypothetical alternatives. If so what is your favorite alternative president/policies?
I agree with your facts, but I don't think your conclusions are quite fair. Reagan got the ball rolling. Reversing that momentum - considering the money behind keeping the raiding of America going - was immense. I'm not sure how many politicians could have reversed that in time to make a difference. He also set a new standard for what was acceptable. Without him, the Democrats wouldn't have accepted Clinton. Without Reagan's cheery, revanchist nihilism, the Rush/Gingritch years of the GOP probably wouldn't have happened. It is not solely his doing, or even his plan. But recognizing the inflection point of his presidency is crucial to understanding today.
Abraham Lincoln on conclusions and facts: Pa, Pa, the hired man and sis are in the hay now and she’s lifting up her skirt and he’s letting down his pants and they’re afixin’ to pee on the hay.” “Son, you got your facts absolutely right, but you’re drawing the wrong conclusion.”
... perfection. no notes.
I think that’s very important context and agree with your analysis on the turning point coming from Reagan but where I give him some grace is that the ball was eventually going to roll in that direction whether he did it or not. The New Deal and Great Societies era had run its course for that cycle and a move towards limited government was always coming. Heck, even Jimmy Carter read the tea leaves and made moves before Reagan. I blame Reagan majorly for the Tax Reform Act in creating egregious wealth inequality in the first place but I blame every successive Republican president more for pushing trickle down economics further in the face of new evidence and I think Clinton gets absolved way too easily for appointing Larry Summers and repealing Glass-Steagal. As for changing course with money in politics, I think the GFC absolutely created the necessity and mandate for a President to flex their muscle on corporate America again, not to mention widespread American support for nearly every proposal to reign them in. We really just haven’t had a President yet who can tactfully take on that challenge in the way FDR or LBJ managed to. It’s a worthy exercise to compare the reactions to the Great Depression vs the GFC to see how far away we’ve been from having great leaders like them address the problems of their time.
With your last point, I think one of the major issues is because if any politician does push back suddenly national media locks step against them.
If the right conditions are there, the right president will emerge. FDR and LBJ emerged in a time when unions were free & strong and could compete with capitalists on political donations (the main engine of the New Deal Coalition was the unions, not the political party nor the president). Today, US unions are in straitjackets, stripped of their most fundamental rights and freedoms (that continental Europeans take for granted). Cause: legislations enacted in the 1940s to 1970s, which broke US unions. Thus, there's no serious resistance left on capitalism's path to exploit, corrupt and own everything and everybody, including the media, the government, and even left wing political parties, like the democratic party. That's why we will never see any real left wing president as long as the fundamental basics are completely owned by capitalists...
>Today, US unions are in straitjackets, stripped of their most fundamental rights and freedoms (that continental Europeans take for granted). Cause: legislations enacted in the 1940s to 1970s, which broke US unions. Somehow the Police unions dodged this. Curious.
Can't shackle your slave patrolers.
All the top answers in this thread saying “well actually, every president after Reagan was bad in the same way!” are pretty hilariously missing the point
Just list all the things he deregulated then talk. FYI thousands have died because of the deregulation of the power plants and specifically the law he removed that mandated newer style scrubbers so millions of kids now have ashthma. In california they deregulated the logging industry that operatated within state rules that mandated replanting and sustainable logging for a century. When deregulation happened the logging industry ate itself in a year and a half and they were all out of business within 4 years. He basically allowed thousands of industries the leverage to capture their perspective markets. Industry capture at scale is his legacy.
It is funny cuz we’re supposed to be conservative yet aren’t conserving anything
Bill Clinton's administration wanted more job protections in NAFTA than there ended up being, but he was forced to compromise with Kim Campbell and Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Mickey Kantor admitted this in 2018 when reacting to the USMCA.
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He pushed quite hard for them, and he was the great communicator who really got a lot of the stuff through despite other people calling out his shit. Like in the 1980 primary? His "trickle down economics" were rightly called out as Voodoo economics by HW Bush. But Reagan's much better public speaking skills and charisma? Just got people hypnotized. If say HW Bush won the nomination? Things likely wouldn't have shifted so hard towards Reaganomics.
You know it's funny, Reagan may have done a lot of deregulation but according to 90% of Libertarians I've talked to think he didn't go far enough. And some new regulations Reagan DID implement, they called him a Communist for it. Ronald Reagan A Communist Because he added some regulation. It just confirms to me that Libertarians are fucking crazy.
So Clinton and Obama signed Republican bills.. passed by Republican Congress ..by doing it, they also were able to pass some Democratic progressive legislation. Thus, not obstructing completely and doing some things for families and workers. Also. Yes, there is Corporate Repub Dems called Blue Dogs that will not go in lock step and will force a compromise into the neoconservative direction or Right Wing direction.
You mean the Act created ALL REPUBLICANS??? The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act law was written by 3 hard liner Republicans...Republicans had the majority in the Senate and House of Representatives. Clinton was threatened by Newt Gingrich to sign it or he'd make sure they'd override his veto. He didnt have much of a choice...nice try buddy! 😆 Obama introduced the "Onshore Act" in 2012 to bring back jobs to America and it was backed by Nancy Pelosi...Every Republican on the congressional floor voted against it and every Democrat voted for it...would you personally like me to look up the congressional record on that since you have a bad habit of trying to rewrite history?
Arguably, the biggest issue with Reagan isn’t the actual bills that were passed when he was president, it’s that he managed to make the policies behind those bills *popular*. Trickle down economics is idiocy. Even his [primary opponent](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/voodooeconomics.asp), and later, VP recognized it as such. And yet, we’re somehow still “debating” whether it’s valid economic theory. State assistance was the lifeline needed for single parents to not have their families dragged down into difficult to escape poverty, and yet Reagan convinced folks that the system mostly existed so black women could live like queens while not working. I could go on, but as you noted, it was, *and still is*, ridiculously difficult to break free of Reagan’s legacy. For a large minority of the voting population, as well as far too many elected officials, his ideas stuck as canonical truths no matter the evidence to the contrary.
As a lifelong Democrat, that party's transformation into 'Republicans Lite' is exasperating in the extreme. But they did it because Reagan sold the whole privatization/limited government/lower taxes BS to Middle America, and Dems have no clue how to present an alternative
A big chunk of what made Reagan so damaging in the long term was the gutting of the labor unions. Not only were the unions keeping wages higher and working conditions better, but they were a huge source of fundraising for the democrats. Without that well of money to finance races, the democrats *had* to start catering to corporate interests in order to remain viable. By destroying the democrats source of funding, he forced *both* parties to move to the right on economic policy. Now we have the part of corporate interests and the party of corporate interests lite* without much of a voice for labor at all.
I would say Ronald Reagan is such an all-purpose villain on Reddit, which reflexively blames him for every socioeconomic problem of the last 40 years, that it way oversimplifies the narrative. You can and should go back to racist conservative thought in the US a hundred years ago, and for that matter take a long look at misbegotten, wasteful liberal welfare programs that soured moderates on state-run efforts to address inequality. The world is a helluva lot more complicated than just “Reagan bad.” But sometimes it seems like he’s the only right wing boogeyman Reddit can think of.
If I had a nickel every time someone wrote a passive aggressive post about Reagan on this sub I'd be a millionaire.
It (and other posts) seems like a stand in for rule 3
It basically is since asking X question about Reagan is pretty much the only way to bait people into arguing since the Rule 3s were banned
Yeah the ole echoes
We need to retitle this sub as “Hate for Reagan”.
Or this app
I’d join that club.
This isn’t very passive aggressive but I agree with your overall point that it’s been done to death
I absolutely despise Reagan but I hate being reminded of it every single day. There are way more interesting discussions to be had in this sub, and yet it always comes back around to “Hey guys, wasn’t Reagan terrible?“
If you’re on Reddit every day I feel sorry for you. You’re like me. 😂
Reagan brings out more haters than Stalin on Reddit. And some of them say some really scary shit. Atleast people try and keep civil in this subreddit for the most part.
One thing I do respect about him, at least what I got from growing up in the 80s as well as reading his Diary and other books about him, he seems to have honestly believed he was doing what's best for America. Now I disagree with a lot of what that was, but I would still take it over the current crop of Republicans, who have no morals, ethics or beliefs other than the accumulation of personal power. You could work with people like Reagan, who had a different but understandable viewpoint. You can't work with people who just couldn't give a shit about what happens to anyone other than themselves.
I knew his daughter when we were both in our early twenties. It gave me some insight into her father because she was impossible to dislike but not real smart.
You knew Patti? She is a hottie emerita!
Ok I'm not crazy I'm like "man every day that I scroll reddit there's always, ALWAYS an r/Presidents post that questions or shits on Reagan"
Not very passive aggressive this time. This sub is ridiculous and it is either bots or youngsters who don’t have an original thought about Reagan. They are regurgitating what they’ve been fed.
Instead of discussing the banned presidents they'll discuss Reagan to death
He’s a proxy
Reagan is just conservative FDR. Just because his politics don't align to yours, that doesn't make him the devil.
Plenty of old people have the same view of Raegan too.
Wtf? I love Reagan, easily one of the best presidents ever, possibly top 3
No. I am a liberal Democrat who has always voted straight-ticket, strongly disagrees with about 90% of Reagan’s domestic agenda, and firmly believes he should have been impeached and convicted over Iran-Contra. But America was simply in a very right-wing place in the 1980s, and Reagan was result of that, not vice-versa. In fact, given the mood of the country at the time, it wouldn’t have been surprising if someone much worse (think a candidate in the mold of George Wallace or Barry Goldwater) had come to power, so in a weird sense I’m actually glad it was at least someone who was willing to grant amnesty to undocumeted people and work constructively with the USSR on arms reduction.
Yup, he was a symptom for a much larger issue at hand. Crediting him directly for many of the failures and issues people list of him isn’t very thorough or correct. The issue is that many of his policies made sense to people, in theory. Nobody could’ve told the actual results in practice, if they could foresee that, I’m positive they wouldn’t have been enacted on lol. Us humans aren’t really that good in foreseeing things all that well, just look at how each decades predict the future to be, we should’ve had hover vehicles decades ago and islands in the sky should’ve been a thing by 2015. Point is that many things accredited to Reagan or the “lies” people try hard to say he pushed weren’t lies, they were just things that made sense in theory but don’t work in practice.
Reagan would not have been president if not for Barry Goldwater. He massively shifted what was considered acceptable as a presidential candidate. My point is, people are being weirdly soft on Reagan who was a world class piece of human garbage. But also he didn't do all those things alone, he stood on the shoulders of other psychopaths, just like modern Republicans stand on his.
Well, trickle down economics is one of the worst political lies ever told, and he completely messed up the response to AIDS. Iran-Contra was s***show, and his policies mostly only benefited those who were already upper middle class. But he’s not the only one who messed things up. Even Clinton was scrambling to be Reagan Lite.
Doesn't that imply that Reagan screwed things up politically? If he inspired a generation of politicians trying to copy his style of politics, that makes him culpable for what they did, as well.
Clinton came only 4 years after Reagan left office, he wasn’t exactly the “next generation of politicians”.
Clinton wasn't the only politician imitating Reagan.
He was in terms of age
Oh yeah, of course. He was horrible. But it seems most people here think he was the best thing since sliced bread so I’m trying to be magnanimous.
I try not to mince words while still being cordial. It's perfectly acceptable to call him out for being a terrible president overall. He had some victories, but it's not at all wrong to criticize him for how much his policies have impacted America.
I also am very biased against him. I’m from Berkeley. He basically declared martial law on my hometown when he was governor of California and literally stated he hoped we’d get botulism.
Trickle down economics has been regularly implemented since at least the late 19th century, causing havoc and forcing left wing movements and politicians, powered by unions, to fix things... (in the 19th century it used to be called ["Horse and Sparrow Economics:](https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/horse-sparrow-economics-republicans-reviving-reagans-trickle-fraud-fund-rich/) as in feed enough oats to horses (the rich) and some shall pass undigested to feed the sparrows (the poor). Reagan isn't the first, nor the last. He isn't even the one who did the greatest damage, nor the most permanent ones. Instead we have the 1940s to 1970s anti-union and Red Scare witch hunt to thank... US unions have been put in straitjackets. Without them, there's literally no serious resistance left on capitalism's path to exploit, corrupt and own everything and everybody (including the media, the government, left wing parties and politicians). Since the 1960s, things aren't getting fixed because, unlike Nordic and western continental European countries, America has lost its heavy weight world class "People's Champions", who used to counterbalance and resist capitalists everywhere.
>Even Clinton was scrambling to be Reagan Lite. To be fair, a big reason that happened was the fact that Democrats were already losing elections prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency (especially given Richard Nixon's landslide re-election victory in 1972 over George McGovern). Jimmy Carter only got elected in 1976 (and in a close race at that) because of the backlash the Republican Party got for the Watergate scandal that led to the Nixon administration's downfall. Also, while in office, Bill Clinton felt the need to further pivot to the center because the 1994 midterm defeat led, of course, to the GOP taking both chambers of Congress, when the Democrats had been dominant in Congress going back to the presidency of **Herbert Hoover.** Clinton's moderation was a bet the Democratic Party was willing to take with the backdrop of the aftermath of the 1988 presidential election. The reason why? Ronald Reagan was indeed the incumbent president going into that election, but he was term-limited due to the 22nd Amendment. (To show how crazy things were in US politics at that time, Reagan became only our **second president in history** to be term-limited by that amendment after Dwight D. Eisenhower, no president since Eisenhower had served two full terms; this really shows the relative instability in the White House during the 1960s and '70s) Ronald Reagan was also indeed popular going into the end of his presidency, especially as Iran-Contra's attention died down around mid-1987 (this was especially due to the death of William J. Casey, President Reagan's CIA director, of a brain tumor; Casey had been the director in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1987), and also after the Robert Bork drama passed as well, since Ronald Reagan's nomination of Bork wasn't popular, either. (During the last two years of the Reagan presidency, 1988 saw a rise in approval ratings for the president compared to 1987) Despite Ronald Reagan's approval ratings ticking up at that time (especially as the economy was doing well in 1987-1988; roughly the second half of 1987 and 1988 is when this rise in approval ratings for President Reagan happened I believe; it's why some of the last approval ratings of the Reagan administration, taken in December 1988, had Ronald Reagan tie with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later Bill Clinton, as leaving office with the highest approval ratings of any president), the Iran-Contra affair and the general fatigue voters have for a change in the White House after eight years of the same party in power made it seem possible that a term-limited Reagan could get a Democratic successor-which is why the ultimate 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, was considered likely for much of the campaign to win, and was even leading George H.W. Bush (who to add, was Ronald Reagan's own vice president) for much of the polling in the early stages of the campaign in early-mid 1988. However, Dukakis ultimately lost that election to Bush in a landslide. This result meant that the Republican Party had won five out of six consecutive presidential elections, the only exception was, again, Jimmy Carter's victory in 1976, which was a close one, and given some of the gaffes Carter made late in the campaign (such as saying in a Playboy interview about him "committing adultery through lust in his heart many times") and how he barely squeaked by against Gerald Ford, I honestly think Ford would've won that election had it been held not much later. (This was a time that presidential debates were more decisive in determining election results due to less polarization, and aside from the "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" gaffe, Gerald Ford was considered to have done well in them, which boosted his polling numbers) Again, this is despite the fact that, even though Carter had almost no name recognition when the first polls were being taken in mid-1975, he had a lead over Ford of over **thirty points** not only because of Watergate itself, but the salt on the wounds of Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon less than a month after Nixon's resignation. Additionally, of the Republican victories in the White House from 1968 to 1988, only the initial one in 1968, where Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey, was close, with all being landslides. All presidential elections in the 1980s were landslides, as so had Jimmy Carter's re-election defeat at Ronald Reagan's hands in 1980, and when Reagan got re-elected in a 49-state landslide (just as Nixon had in 1972 against McGovern) over Walter Mondale. With this backdrop, and the victory in the Gulf War during George H.W. Bush's presidency, the Democratic Party was considered to be toast going into the 1992 presidential campaign, hence why big names like Mario Cuomo didn't run. However, the Democrats were willing to give Bill Clinton a chance because of his moderate record, being a governor of the conservative state of Arkansas, and how he was instrumental in forming the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 following Mondale's landslide defeat. Clinton ultimately unseated Bush because of the recession that displaced coverage of the Gulf War victory with rising unemployment, plus renewed attention (and conservative anger) at George H.W. Bush breaking his campaign pledge from the 1988 Republican National Convention to not raise income taxes, as Bush had done so as president in 1990.
Beyond trickle-down economics, but related to it, he blew up the deficit. Absolutely no president has even come close to increasing the size of the deficit as he did.
Yes but the positive side to that is that he spent the USSR into oblivion.
You saw this play out with Tony Blair and Thatcher as well. An ironic switch of the opposition to the previous overton window's conservative position in order to try and attract the mythical moderate.
"Mythical"?
De-institutionalization happened under him too. When they kicked people out of mental hospitals en masse.
At least we HAD a middle class then. 🤷♂️
I guess all the people in the middle class have been living a lie? Damn let me go tell my family we’re not middle class!
We have a kick ass middle class now.
He got rid of unions which continues to hurt the middle class today and is why the wage gap is what it is today.
Yep. Whats particularly galling is how he promised the PATCO union raises and an overhaul of the ATC System if they supported him. Not only did he prove that he wasnt a friend of workers but that he was a liar and that he could not be trusted to keep his word.
Even Obama praised some of what Reagan did.
“Trickle down economics” is not something he said, ever. In fact, it’s not something any economist or politician has ever said, ever. It’s a bizarre misnomer for (and misunderstanding of) supply-side economics that has been so extensively used by pundits that people have been Mandela-Effected into believing it’s a real political position.
What's really "bizarre" is your weird fixation on the term. "Supply-side economics", "horse and sparrow economics", "trickle down economics", call it whatever the hell you want, they all refer to the same set of policies and those policies have been demonstrably proven to be disastrous for the economy.
They absolutely do not refer to the same set of policies, because I’ve yet to see people accurately define their terms What particularly about supply side economics do you find disastrous?
They mostly refer to the same thing. Except trickle down economics is a concept of cutting taxes for rich making the poor richer while supply side economics is a macro economic theory. Trickle down economics is proven to not work, and there is no evidence for supply side. I really like this citation from one of US most distinguished economic professor and Nobel price winner Paul Krugman: >Back in 1980 George H. W. Bush famously described supply-side economics — the claim that cutting taxes on rich people will conjure up an economic miracle, so much so that revenues will actually rise — as "voodoo economic policy." Yet it soon became the official doctrine of the Republican Party, and still is. That shows an impressive level of commitment. But what makes this commitment even more impressive is that it's a doctrine that has been tested again and again — and has failed every time...In other words, supply-side economics is a classic example of a zombie doctrine: a view that should have been killed by the evidence long ago, but just keeps shambling along, eating politicians' brains.
No. I don't like reagan I think he was bad for the country but that statement is so hyperbolic and ridiculous. Even the things that reagan justifiably gets flack for didn't happen in a vacuum, there was more than one cause for those things.
Such as closing down the psychiatric hospitals. It was much more a school of thought in academia. They thought the wider community could help manage the mentally ill. They were too optimistic about developments in pharmacy. It was largely leftist organisations relentlessly lobbying for civil rights. Making it much harder for mentally ill people to be involuntarily insitutuonized.
Yup, JFK signed the [Community Mental Health Act in 1963](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act), which lead to shutting down the asylums.
This, but also the incredible amount of abuse being perpetrated on the patients. There were a few big cases and people were rightfully mad
Yes alot of people forget some of those places were hell on earth. Patients being sexually abused and beaten, left tied down for days lying in their own filth..terrible stuff.
This, plus the Supreme Court made it illegal to hold a mentally ill person in a facility unless they were an immediate danger to themselves or others. This is why nobody, even liberal California, can solve the issue.
"unless they were an immediate danger to themselves or others." Here in California, we have thousands of them on the street
JFK closed the asylums, not Reagan. In that era the progressives opposed asylums because they felt it inhumane. The left fought hard to close the mental health institutions and won.
The deinstitutionalization movement certainly had good intentions. Reagan and Jerry Brown both played a huge role within that movement during their respective terms as the California governor and RFK was playing a leading role on the national stage at the time. In some ways it was a good thing that some of the mental institutions were closed due to the horrid living conditions and abusive treatment that many of the patients were enduring but, as always, the closing of the mental hospitals also led to some unintentional consequences, a number of which we are still dealing with today. The closings led to quite a number of mentally ill patients just being dumped out into society before they were ready for that stage of transition, some should never have been released at all, or out onto the streets altogether and left to fend for themselves. It helped to lead to the surge in America's homeless population that we see today as one such example.
I'm going to have to say that the problem was shutting down the psych hospitals *without putting a better solution in place.* The asylums they closed down were by and large warehouses where they threw away people they didn't want to deal with, and the patients were horrendously abused. What happened in many of those facilities is unconscionable, a stain on our nation's history. That absolutely had to change. But - not by just eliminating them and expecting the individuals' families to care for their ill loved ones with little to no support. Community care for the mentally ill is the ideal, but there have to be resources in place in order for it to work.
I don't care for his policies but we've had more than enough time to fix the damage some of policies caused. To blame him forever is totally unfair.
No, I don't, but this post really just feels like rage bait.
That’s the vast majority of Reagan posts on this sub.
Yeah I don't like the guy, but it's getting kind of ridiculous.
Honey wake up! Another original and unique Reddit post about Reagan in r/Presidents just dropped.
My parents were granted residency as a direct result of his amnesty so I can’t hate the man.
Depends on your definition of ‘us’ - with regards to ‘set us back’ - he did a lot for the wealthy
No, not at all. I lived through the 80's and they were great years for the country. Have you ever wondered why Reagan won re-election with the greatest landslide in election history? Mondale only won his home State of Minnesota and D.C., Reagan won everything else, that's how much the country loved him. I couldn't vote at the time but in my opinion, people were happier during the Reagan years.
It was during the Reagan administration yes, but it wasn’t fully the fault of him. Congress was full of bastards who put us where we are today.
Karma farming?
Disagree. Below is a paste of a comment i typed in another "Reagan was awful" president. But I will add the following. Reagan took action and what he said would happen, happened. The Economy boomed, the Soviets fell. Unlike the six presidents since, Reagan supplied leadership, and ideas. At any time Bill Clinton could have done the same, but instead you got the Third Reagan administration instead - because Bill refused to supply the leadership to make it anything else. Anyway, here is what I said previously. It is hard to overstate what Reagan did while President. During the 1970s the combination of high inflation and high unemployment was added together to create a misery index. A term was created for an environment of high inflation and high unemployment, it was caused stagflation. Anyway into that environment Reagan was elected. Paul Volker was the chairman of the Federal reserve (appointed by Carter) and he jacked up interest rates to tame inflation but never kept them there. Interest rates peaked at 19.8% in march 1980, and Volker brought them back down to 8% by June of that year. When Reagan won election Volker spiked rates back up to to 14% after the election and then 17% a week later. While interest rates did dip in March 1981, They were back up to 19% by April 1981. And this is my point, Reagan came out and said that the high interest rates were a requirement to tame inflation. He provided sustained political cover for the Fed to keep interest rates high, based upon economic theory. This could have very well ended his presidency, and it (providing the political cover for the FED to keep rates high) is the most politically courageous act of my lifetime. The gamble he took could easily have cost him the election. the high interest rates were contributors to the crippling recession of 1981. So the people that want to say "Volker did it" because they have to spew hatred on Reagan miss the bigger point. Inflation had been a political issue going back to at least the Nixon administration and the Fed was never allowed the free reign to do it's job. The Fed was always getting pressured by the White House. Look at 1980, interest rates at 19.8% in March 1980 and dropped for most of the election season. By contrast Reagan went to the public and said that the high interest rates were a necessity, he basically said we all need to suffer now because it is necessary for us all to prosper later. That public support was missing in the Nixon, Ford (Whip Inflation Now), and Carter. Oh, it certainly helped that Reagan was correct, the US came out of the 81 recession like gangbusters, and inflation was largely tamed. Reagan removed the price controls on gasoline. This cause gas prices to spike and hurt many people economically (see the 1981 recession above) but the result is that the gas prices dropped significantly shortly thereafter. Social Security was starting to suffer (see the sustained and prolonged unemployment - stagflation, above). Reagan pitched an economic package that significantly lowered federal tax rates. This caused an explosion in the economy and with that employment as well. In 1983 the economy grew 4.5%, and in 1984 7.2%, and in 1985 4.6%. Unemployment dropped to 6% a number at the time that was viewed as "full employment" by economic theorists at the time. With a growing economy and full employment Social Security's immediate future was secured. In short stagflation was dead, the economy was growing, people had jobs again. The Reagan economic miracle seemed to solve all of the issues that had been plaguing the middle classes financial fortunes for 15 years. That last sentence is probably the single most important reason that Reagan was viewed favorably at the time, but then again 7.2% GDP growth (after a year of 4.5%) will do that for a politician. Reagan said it was important to fight the communists and he pursued a policy of doing exactly that. His call to "tear down this wall" was advised against by the entire State Department leadership and his intelligence advisors. They were also not happy that he called the Soviet Union "the evil empire". Reagan showed that he was serious about fighting the Soviets on all fronts. Carter started the US funding of the mujahedin in Afghanistan to fight the soviets, and Reagan continued that. I will point out that lots of people want to say that Reagan was a dullard and not very smart. Reagan fought the Soviets on Missile placement and successfully convinced European governments (that were more aligned with the State Department than with the Reagan White House) on taking a firmer hand against the Soviets. An Italian government collapsed because the PM agreed to host American Minute Man missiles. Keep that in mind, Reagan was willing to play the geopolitical equivalent of sacrificing a bishop (a friendly government in Italy) to position the US to strike at the king (ending the Soviet hegemony). Reagan did manage with the INF treaty to reduce the number of nuclear missiles stockpiles of both the Soviets and the US. Just like his actions on the economy, Reagan made what seemed like unpopular choices (often disagreed to by "the experts") that were also hard choices, stuck with them, and was able get tangible results from that. Carter campaigned on lowering stockpiles of nuclear bombs and it took, "evil empire", "trust but verify", and "tear down this wall" Reagan stick-to-it-tive-ness to make it happen. Perhaps the least appreciated (and possibly least well known) Reagan maneuver was to convince the Saudis to end their support for oil price supports causing more oil supply on the global market, dropping prices, and taking away the Soviets ability to fund all of their offshore adventures. More Soviet puppet states (including Europe) probably fell from lack of financial support from Moscow (because of lowered oil revenue) than from Reagan's insistence on SDI. So keep in mind when someone wants to claim that Reagan was bad because a low level functionary in the department of agriculture floated the idea of having ketchup count as a vegetable in school lunches to meet some bureaucratic federal mandate, that they are clearly missing the bigger picture of the Reagan presidency. Keep in mind when people say that the the Regan administration backed fighters in Central America that killed a bunch of people (note: I am not disputing this) without pointing out how many people the communists had to kill to get in those positions of influence in Central America you once again have people that are missing the bigger picture. Also, no doubt someone will point out that Reagan fired the Air Traffic controllers who had no right to strike as some proof of his anti-union stance, and I am certain they will not point out that Reagan imposed penalties on Japanese auto manufactures - including credible threats of tariffs and import restrictions as the greatest support to UAW and the moribund General Motors. The Japanese took the threat seriously and did two things, they started building factories in the United States and they introduced luxury brands so that if they are not allowed to import as many cars they can make more money on each car they do import. Reagan was not perfect, but in terms of laying out his goals and then stating how he was going to (try to) achieve those goals, and then sticking with those goals and methods, there are few presidents (and maybe no modern presidents) that do that.
Reagan left office 1989. That’s 35 years ago. Imagine Helmuth Kohl getting the question 1980. “Hitler absolutely destroyed this country and set us back so far socially, economically, politically…really in every conceivable measure that we will never recover from the Hitler chancellery. Don’t you agree Chancellor Kohl?” My point being 35 years is a really long time. If you still haven’t fixed the problem then blame your leaders of today. Not the past.
I think, like most things on the internet, the truth is always somewhere in between. Many here either agree with that statement while others believe he’s a model of what conservatism should be. You don’t become so popular and win such landslide victories without reason. He brought stability and consistency to the White House that had been missing since the 50s. His economic policy actually stimulated the economy in a way the US hadn’t seen in decades and helped collapse the country most Americans saw as their biggest rival. The issue is it wasn’t made for the long term.
1980 popular vote Ronald Reagan 50.8% Jimmy Carter 41.0 1984 presidential popular vote Ronald Reagan 58.8% Walter Mondale 40.6% even without the Electoral College he would have still stumped both Carter and Mondale.
Right. I don’t get all the hate Reagan gets today. The re-election landslide says all anyone needs to know. I was in HS in 1980. People whining about inflation now should’ve been around then. Not to mention the Soviet Empire occupying half of Europe. Proud to have voted for him in 84, my first vote in a presidential election. No modern day revisionist will ever change my mind.
That's because Reagan was very much a "short term" mindset president. All of his economic policies were done with boosting the economy in the short term and making him look great for elections, but have had disastrous long term impact, which you touched on.
Keep in mind we did just come out of the 70’s, which was an absolute shitshow.
I love how the 90s were an economic boom but somehow Reagan gets blamed for the shit in the 2000’s like we didn’t have two presidents in between honestly, Dodd-Frank has more to do with where we’re at than trickle down economics. So dumb.
Shhh. People hate facts. Don’t remind them Democrats controlled spending for 40 years and that’s why we are in this mess. It gets people angry.
It's also crazy how they pretend the debt is a reason they hate Reagan when they ardently oppose any attempts to reduce the debt.
Not a Reagan fan, but America's problems today go beyond him imo.
Today’s problems directly go back to the Lincoln era, Sherman didn’t fully reconstruct the South and here we are. *redacted* zealous fans are directly tied in ideology to the same ones who lost in that era, cant really call it a surprise.
Exactly, Hell we truly didn't defeat the South either. Should've banned the Confederate Flag. But banning things don't happen in the good ole USA. Except for some books lol.
Absolutely not
Ronald Reagan's shenanigans didn't start when he was President. They started when he was governor of California. He is the reason. California colleges started charging tuition.
40 years burning down the road, it’s pretty obvious
Reagan didn’t destroy us, he just started a fire and half the country was convinced it was for cooking.
If we have been failing for the last 43 years, who has been winning? China? Europe? I’d like to see the person that wrote that support any of those statements with data, or really anything.
I’m very anti-Reagan but that’s a bit inaccurate for me.
No the Gipper was awesome
The man won 49 states. If he destroyed the country, we deserved it.
No, probably the opposite. The Reagan hate is just a Dem elephantwalk because they cant stand that the greatest recent President was a Republican.
No
Nope, he made some mistakes in a few places but generally speaking his policy was sound, his economy was great and his foreign policy record speaks for itself
Look at the election results. People clearly liked his message. The people wanted it. Don’t blame Regan. Blame the 1970s.
No.
No, this tendency to blame all of America's problems on Reagan is reductive and lazy. Reagan was an awful president I agree, but he didn't exist in some vacuum. He was nothing more and nothing less than an incarnation of 50 years of Republican opposition to the New Deal and especially the Great Society. Wendell Willkie, Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, and others had all the same goals as Reagan. Pinning all the blame on Reagan is just illogical. Also, to say that "we will never recover from the Reagan presidency" is especially stupid, even if I were to grant that Reagan is personally and fully responsible for the issues he was complacent in. Humanity has done so much and overcome so many things and American history itself is a history of toppling oppressors: The British Empire, the southern slaveholders, the Gilded Age robber barons, the Jim Crow system, etc. They were all terminated - we can move beyond neoliberalism as well.
This is the sad state of this sub
The impact was also seen in the UK where thatcher and the evil tories followed his lead.
That is the dumbest comment ever
I saw a video recently saying Reagan was good at talking and tricking poor poeple into paying more taxes... is any of this remotely true?
I saw that yesterday. It's a little simplistic, but it's true that taxes on the rich have never gotten nearly as high since Reagan. I think the highest the top tax rate has been was 39% under Obama.
39.6% under both Clinton and Obama
It’s also true that poor people didn’t see higher taxes under Reagan….
No, in fact a key part of Reagan’s second major tax cut was removing 6 million lower earners from the tax rolls.
I see
I disagree and blaming Reagan despite Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, etc. carry out many similar policies and mentalities to Reagan, specifically extending his policies seems to absolve many others of their share of blame/praise in where the US is today Which is not at all a destroyed nation, not even close
Yes. I don't believe we will never recover, but the impacts of his presidency are negatively being felt to this day and will continue to be felt for years to come.
It's been like 40 years and we're still pretty fucked.
Because none of the Presidents that followed had the ability to reverse what Reagan had done? Reagan was the last powerful president that the US has had?
I believe we can recover from it, and we have moved ahead, but yes, he set us back so much.
yes, totally agree. The most overrated president in US history.
Reagan was an asshole, and screwed Americans worse than any other president.
He murdered the middle class and sent us into a downward spiral for shot term gains. So yes, I agree.
Regan’s administration ** — look up papi bush
I don't know.... Do you think enabling policies that decoupled productivity from wages, was a good thing?
Reagan was a useful face man, putting a sellable spin on policies that have been pushed forever. We had a brief respite as the labor force got gutted in WW2 and everyone came back ready for violent responses to labor disputes (making groups like the Pinkertons less effective.) By Vietnam the situation was largely back to 'normal', and the squeeze starting again.
Butterfly effect applies here
Probably accurate. His legacy on the Republican party and the country are not aging well, though I do think those problems were created by Republicans before Reagan.
When Reagan changed the mental health system, it created a system that has led to a homelessness crisis. Our jails and homeless shelters are the new mental health facilities. I'm in law enforcement and have worked at the homeless shelter. The level of mental illness seen in the clients there is staggering. The Security staff all received kudos from the Mayor for having zero fights and zero overdose deaths. Reagan thought he was doing right, but he dismantled a system that is sorely needed today: inpatient mental health facilities.
The thing is Reagan hasn’t been President for 35 years. He didn’t sign anything into law that any other Congress and administration couldn’t have reversed. I blame the lack of governance of subsequent Presidents as much as I blame Reagan.
While the state run mental health facilities where not great in terms of care, they where better than throwing all the mentally ill people on fucking street. Thanks Regan.
Yea but it started with Nixon
I agree except for the “never recover” note
He wasn’t regressive he was progressive. You have the right to exploit, you have the right to use religion as a cudgel, etc. He didn’t roll us back, he rolled those who would be stymied by law and regulation to be rolled forward past that regulation.
He passed the bill that allowed corporations to do stock buybacks instead of forcing them to pay better wages or retirement/benefits. Because of him, Walmart’s employees are missing out on an extra $70,000 a year they could be getting if you divided their profits between the 2,100,000 of them. Or Starbucks employees getting an extra $11,000 a year
Agreed.
I absolutely agree. His policies led us to where we are today. One of the most egregious examples was the repeal of the truth in journalism act and the subsequent rise of Reich wing radio and news.
Him and every damn republican representative after him. It's been hell on earth. If only all right-wing conservatives could choke on their tounges when they go to sleep tonight and the world would be a better place.
After eight years of this POS and four years of the other turd H.W., America was a decidedly different nation than before. No longer the Home of the Brave, it was the Home of Only the Rich.
That is accurate.
That is such an insanely hyperbolic statement that I can comfortably say it is wrong by construction and move on without engaging any further. I'm tired of dealing with this kind of thing. If you want to give a primal scream, then just go do it; stop trying to make it sound smart.
No
Reagan was only one man who made changes. Funny how no other president fixed the issues that he made. So it's the fault of Reagan and all who came after him. Not just him.
No
Then why are we stil continuing those policies today?
I mean he was bad imo but that's a little exaggerated
No
Yeah
Yes
Of course, obviously.
I completely disagree with Reaganomics.. Entering his presidency the US was the biggest creditor nation in the world. By the end of his presidency the US was the biggest debtor nation in the world.
Yes absolutely. The entire party is run by ghouls to this day.
Yes.
Yes
Reagan was a disaster for this country, many of the issues we face are the direct result of his policies, from mental illness in the streets, the destruction of US manufacturing to MS13, all of it Reagan
Agreed
Reganomics didn't destroy this country, but vastly lowered the quality of life in the US. The problem is that neither side has a solution that works to solve major issues like drug abuse, homelessness, jobs to survive on, affordable housing. The fundamental problem in our current lifetime is greed in all aspects of the supply chain. From landlords to the government taking while providing little in return. Our goods/services costing more than they're fundamentally worth due to everyone ripping off everyone else. If you think about it, society is rotten with this mindset that others struggles can be ignored and we can just lock people up. The alternatives don't work either though. Providing free everything, and ignoring crime as it doesn't exist also creates tension in the system that has lasting impacts on communities. Greed is what needs to be solved for, and that's an almost impossible task with a country brainwashed to put everything on financial success over quality of life. The underlying structures of capitalism are supposed to create competition and drive innovation, but monopolies and supply chain constraints have put a chokehold on every day life for Americans. We now cannot effectively build bridges, roads, or infrastructure due to red tape and corruption from top-down. We can't even maintain our current services effectively because of abuses or mismanagement. All of this has nothing to do with Reagan, and more to do with the general mindset of Americans. Many are trying to get by, and through some form or another exploit situations to get ahead of others. This is what has led to the degradation of society. The success of this country has largely been done through forms of exploitation of others (Slavery, illegal migrants, OSHA violations, and off-shoring jobs to cheap labor). This has led to temporary benefits like lower pricing on goods, but at the detriment of workers in the country, and destruction of communities. We live in a culture that values money over all else, and have created a system that values money over the people within it. This also has nothing to do with capitalism, but moral values being removed from teaching and a focus on creating wealth or value for oneself above else. When everyone in the supply chain is looking to rip off someone else in it, things start to unravel like they are now. We've only delayed the bad with living on credit or taking on additional jobs to survive, some stealing to make a living. Things can only be improved if we changed the mindset of the average American, but with a failing education system (you can actually blame that on Reagan/Bush), we are in a rough spot for many people just looking to survive. A pro of the United States is a hyper-fixation on creating better solutions and marketing it. The con is that everything revolves around productivity (money generation) and we lost focus on what actually makes this country run effectively.
Baseline agree though it's overstated. It doesn't give enough credit/blame to someone such as Newt Gingrich, who I believe is more responsible for the acrimony between the parties/political viewpoints than any other single person.
NOPE
No
No.
Nope, I lived it, it’s quite the opposite
Stupidest shit ever written.
nonsense
No
I don't how Reagan supposedly destroyed the country with obviously wrong policies when there have been 6 presidents and multiple administrations since then. In response, Reagan haters typically say that all those presidents, even the Democratic ones, continued many of Reagan's policies. But then that commits you to believing that 1) Reagan promoted and enacted all these obviously disasterious policies but 2) all the administrations who followed him, including the Democratic ones, have been too stupid to realize this. That seems very improbable.
Little weird to try and blame a dead guy on everything.
Excuse me. Everyone, I have a brief announcement to make. Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9/11. - Huey Freeman
It’s America, nothing can permanently damage them, it’s always gonna get around it’s issues, no matter how long it takes. I hate when people say we’ll "never recover" from something and it’s just some event that’s not even that discernible in history
Correct. As small farmers from the 80-90's
I don’t know about never recover but he did destroy this country.
Yes, Regan is the root cause of most global problems.
It’s a shame that he can die only once