Ronald Reagan: Worst president ever

[Dad2three]

December 24, 1984

President Reagan's budget and tax proposals have touched off a clash between the Administration and state officials, who contend they would lose billions of dollars in Federal support when they are being asked to take greater responsibility for domestic programs.



Governors in both parties said they supported Mr. Reagan's efforts to give states greater authority to make decisions about health, education, welfare, transporation and environmental programs. But the governors expressed concern that the Federal Government was reducing the states' resources while expanding their responsibilities.

Budget proposals tentatively approved by Mr. Reagan would freeze, cut or eliminate many Federal grants to the states. Mr. Reagan's budget envisions $34 billion in domestic savings for the fiscal year 1986 and $168 billion in domestic savings for 1986-88. About half the savings would come out of programs affecting the states.


REAGAN'S PLANS FOR BUDGET CUTS ANGERING STATES




My students pay too much for college. Blame Reagan.


Today’s student aid crisis has its roots in the 1980s. In 1981, the Reagan administration, with a coalition of congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats, pushed through Congress a combination of tax- and budget-cutting measures.

No federal program suffered deeper cuts than student aid....


Effectively, these changes shifted the federal government’s focus from providing students higher education grants to providing loans.


My students pay too much for college. Blame Reagan.


Voters Loosen Belt Reagan Tightened
States Take On U.s. Burden


The revolution, of course, is Reagan`s. It is well known. Since he came to power almost five years ago, the President has cut income taxes and domestic federal spending. Because of federal budget cuts, less money flows from Washington to the poor, the schools, clinics and hospitals, sewer and water plants and other social services...


While Reagan and Congress were cutting taxes and slashing roughly $250 billion from domestic spending, the National Council of State Legislatures says state taxes increased by $3.8 billion in 1981, $2.9 billion in 1982, $7.7 billion in 1983 and almost $1 billion in 1984, for a total increase of $15.4 billion.

Some localities also raised revenue, usually by increasing property taxes. According to the Tax Foundation, total local tax revenue was $86.4 billion in 1980, $113 billion in 1983 and probably about $121 billion last year--$34.6 billion more than before Reagan took office....


The nearly $50 billion increase in state and local taxes did not, of course, entirely offset the federal cuts. Some government services, especially the ones that help the poor, have been substantially reduced.



Voters Loosen Belt Reagan Tightened

 

[francoHFW]

See sig paragraph 1, like I said. By raising taxes and fees on the nonrich and cutting all kinds of investment in them and the country DUH. Stupid wars and covert horrors...see also 41 and 43, and all the Reaganist blocking of reform under Obama. DUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Aren't you turds always complaining that Reagan ruined America by cutting taxes? Which is it? Did he raise them or cut them? Also, didn't the increase in FICA taxes "save" Social Security?

What "fees" did Reagan increase?

BTW, Reagan didn't cut any social programs - none. Spending on social programs increased dramatically under his administration. That's the ransom he had to pay to Tip O'Neil to get his defense increases.

Nobody said anything about fees, but state and local fees have gotten ridiculous to make up for federal cuts in aid.

And BS. google Reagan social program cuts.

Allow me to quote you:

"See sig paragraph 1, like I said. By raising taxes and fees."​

Federal aid hasn't been cut, so that claim it bullshit as well.

Federal aid to states and localities hasn't been cut under Reaganism? Everything BUT SS hasn't been cut? WRONG.

Now it's "under Reaganism" rather than "under Reagan" Why is no one surprised that you are moving the goal posts?

Under both...same crappe for 33 years.

 

[francoHFW]

And one came from the dailykos so that should tell you all you need to know

you'll find a bunch of hateful snots over there. so don't waste your time

and never heard of some consortium news or whatever it's called

the reaganut apologist hard at work as usual.

wonder when crusader retard will come along and start tooting Reagans horn as well.That guy takes it so personal and goes into meltdown when the truth is exposed about his idol.Much worse than stephanie does.

Here are some pesky little facts that stephanie,crusader retard and the other reaganut worshippers cant get around.actual facts being reported back then from the 1980's how reagan ruined the economy.they can only whine and cry in defeat how their hero has been exposed.



and here is a real in depth viewing of the most corrupt administration ever at the time in this one hour video.the author of this book really does an excellent job of exposing this fraud president.

That's awful!!!! Reagan added $1.6 trillion to the debt. Awful!

Obama added $7.5 trillion, so far. No big deal, eh comrade?

About the same in 2015 dollars DUH, and Reagan did it in "Good times". In fact that's how he did it, dumbass. ANOTHER fake Pub success...heard of S+L scandal bust/recession? Brainwashed functional MORONS.

About the same in 2015 dollars DUH, and Reagan did it in "Good times".

Not even close. Duh. And for Reagan's spending, we won the Cold War.
All of Obama's spending and he lost the ME to ISIS.
Great job, moron.

Gorby won the Cold War, not your demented actor.

 

[Dad2three]

10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan



1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser. As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said.

2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit. During the Reagan years, the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion, “roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the century had done altogether.” Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control.

3. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Unemployment jumped to 10.8 percent after Reagan enacted his much-touted tax cut, and it took years for the rate to get back down to its previous level. Meanwhile, income inequality exploded. Despite the myth that Reagan presided over an era of unmatched economic boom for all Americans, Reagan disproportionately taxed the poor and middle class, but the economic growth of the 1980’s did little help them. “Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted.

4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously. Reagan promised “to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending,” but federal spending “ballooned” under Reagan. He bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it, and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He promised to cut government agencies like the Department of Energy and Education but ended up adding one of the largest — the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which today has a budget of nearly $90 billion and close to 300,000 employees. He also hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war.

5. Reagan did little to fight a woman’s right to choose. As governor of California in 1967, Reagan signed a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion laws that “resulted in more than a million abortions.” When Reagan ran for president, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother, but once in office, he “never seriously pursued” curbing choice.

6. Reagan was a “bellicose peacenik.” He wrote in his memoirs that “[m]y dream…became a world free of nuclear weapons.” “This vision stemmed from the president’s belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war — and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons,” the Washington Monthly noted. And Reagan’s military buildup was meant to crush the Soviet Union, but “also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control” for the the entire world — a vision acted out by Regean’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, when he became president.

7. Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Reagan signed into law a bill that made any immigrant who had entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty. The bill was sold as a crackdown, but its tough sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants were removed before final passage. The bill helped 3 million people and millions more family members gain American residency. It has since become a source of major embarrassment for conservatives.

8. Reagan illegally funneled weapons to Iran. Reagan and other senior U.S. officials secretly sold arms to officials in Iran, which was subject to a an arms embargo at the time, in exchange for American hostages. Some funds from the illegal arms sales also went to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua — something Congress had already prohibited the administration from doing. When the deals went public, the Iran-Contra Affair, as it came to be know, was an enormous political scandal that forced several senior administration officials to resign.

9. Reagan vetoed a comprehensive anti-Apartheid act. which placed sanctions on South Africa and cut off all American trade with the country. Reagan’s veto was overridden by the Republican-controlled Senate. Reagan responded by saying “I deeply regret that Congress has seen fit to override my veto,” saying that the law “will not solve the serious problems that plague that country.”

10. Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Reagan fought a proxy war with the Soviet Union by training, arming, equipping, and funding Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan. Reagan funneled billions of dollars, along with top-secret intelligence and sophisticated weaponry to these fighters through the Pakistani intelligence service. The Talbian and Osama Bin Laden — a prominent mujahidin commander — emerged from these mujahidin groups Reagan helped create, and U.S. policy towards Pakistan remains strained because of the intelligence services’ close relations to these fighters. In fact, Reagan’s decision to continue the proxy war after the Soviets were willing to retreat played a direct role in Bin Laden’s ascendancy.

Conservatives seem to be in such denial about the less flattering aspects of Reagan; it sometimes appears as if they genuinely don’t know the truth of his legacy. Yesterday, when liberal activist Mike Stark challenged hate radio host Rush Limbaugh on why Reagan remains a conservative hero despite raising taxes so many times, Limbaugh flew into a tirade and demanded, “Where did you get this silly notion that Reagan raised taxes?”

UPDATE
Salon has more in their series “The Real Reagan,” including how he cared more about UFOs than AIDS and how Reagan destroyed respect for the social compact that rebuilt America after World War II.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Reagan was a traitor that did great harm to this country

 

[ninja007]

 

[Dad2three]

How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan


The myth of Ronald Reagan was already looming in the spring of 1997 — when a highly popular President Bill Clinton was launching his second-term, pre-Monica Lewinsky, and the Republican brand seemed at low ebb. But what neoconservative activist Grover Norquist and his allies proposed that spring was virtually unheard of — an active, mapped-out, audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan’s legacy across America.

In a sense, some of the credit for triggering this may belong to those supposedly liberal editors at the New York Times, and their decision at the end of 1996 to publish that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. survey of the presidents. The below-average rating by the historians for Reagan, coming right on the heels of Clintons’ easy reelection victory, was a wake-up call for these people who came to Washington in the 1980s as the shock troops of a revolution and now saw everything slipping away ...

How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan - Salon.com

 

[ScienceRocks]

Spending on infrastructure, science, r&d and education is what built this country! Regulating the private sector was one of the biggest moments of the 20th century in building our middle class.

Stupid fucking tiny government assholes.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

And one came from the dailykos so that should tell you all you need to know

you'll find a bunch of hateful snots over there. so don't waste your time

and never heard of some consortium news or whatever it's called

the reaganut apologist hard at work as usual.

wonder when crusader retard will come along and start tooting Reagans horn as well.That guy takes it so personal and goes into meltdown when the truth is exposed about his idol.Much worse than stephanie does.

Here are some pesky little facts that stephanie,crusader retard and the other reaganut worshippers cant get around.actual facts being reported back then from the 1980's how reagan ruined the economy.they can only whine and cry in defeat how their hero has been exposed.



and here is a real in depth viewing of the most corrupt administration ever at the time in this one hour video.the author of this book really does an excellent job of exposing this fraud president.

That's awful!!!! Reagan added $1.6 trillion to the debt. Awful!

Obama added $7.5 trillion, so far. No big deal, eh comrade?

About the same in 2015 dollars DUH, and Reagan did it in "Good times". In fact that's how he did it, dumbass. ANOTHER fake Pub success...heard of S+L scandal bust/recession? Brainwashed functional MORONS.

About the same in 2015 dollars DUH, and Reagan did it in "Good times".

Not even close. Duh. And for Reagan's spending, we won the Cold War.
All of Obama's spending and he lost the ME to ISIS.
Great job, moron.

Gorby won the Cold War, not your demented actor.

Gorby won the Cold War, not your demented actor.

Yeah, when you have to pull tens of thousands of your troops back home and you lose all your conquered republics, that is a sure sign that you've won the Cold War. Shit, that's hilarious!!!

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

Reagan was a traitor that did great harm to this country

Just when I think you can't get any dumber, you drop another 30 IQ points.

 

[Dad2three]

DID REAGAN PROPOSE HIGHER SPENDING?

Supply-siders dispute the claim that Reagan requested more spending than Congress actually passed. To show that Congress was actually the Big Spender, they commonly give the following chart, which shows that Congress outspent Reagan's budget requests in 7 out of 8 years:
Federal Budget Outlays
Proposed (Reagan) and Actual (Congress) and
Cumulative Percent Difference
(billions of dollars)1

Outlays
Fiscal Year Proposed Actual % Difference (Cumulative)
1982 695.3 745.8 7.3
1983 773.3 808.4 4.5 (12.1)
1984 862.5 851.8 -1.2 (10.8)
1985 940.3 946.4 0.7 (11.6)
1986 973.7 990.3 1.7 (13.5)
1987 994.0 1003.9 1.0 (14.6)
1988 1024.3 1064.1 3.9 (19.1)
1989 1094.2 1144.2 4.6 (24.5)
______________________________________
Totals $7,357.6 $7,554.9 Avg 2.8 (3.1) (averages for 82-9)
The problem with this chart is that the proposal numbers are phony. Reagan's proposals were based on such optimistic forecasts of the economy that they bore little resemblance to reality.

To understand how the ruse works, a brief review of the budget process is helpful. A budget passed by Congress is not written in stone; there are actually many flexible items in it. One example is unemployment. The budget says, "Pay each unemployed person XXXX amount in unemployment compensation." If the unemployment rate rises higher next year than anticipated, the budget automatically pays these extra individuals without requiring Congressional action.

Another example of a flexible budget item is interest on the debt. If interest rates soar or receipts drop more than expected, then interests costs are going to be greater. These are paid without Congressional action (unless the debt limit is reached).

In the president's budget proposals, he must estimate next year's unemployment rate, interest rates, and several other economic indicators. We have already seen that in Reagan's first budget, David Stockman came up with a super-optimistic forecast that predicted 5 percent economic growth. (The higher the growth, the less government has to spend on unemployment, welfare, stimulus packages, etc.) Today, Stockman derisively refers to his first budget as the "Rosy Scenario." Although Reagan's remaining budgets were not quite as far-fetched as the Rosy Scenario, they were indeed much too optimistic. In fact, the only reason why spending surpassed the requests in only 7 instead of all 8 years was because one year -- 1984 -- actually saw a phenomenal spike of 6 percent growth.

What supply-siders are doing with the above chart, then, is comparing what was spent in the real world with what Reagan proposed in 8 Rosy Scenarios. They then blame the difference on Congressional action -- despite the fact that Congress didn't act on these increases.

The ruse is akin to a President proposing to spend one dollar on the budget next year, and blaming Congress for (inevitably) exceeding this proposal. Even if it turns out that Congress cuts the real budget, and the economy does better than normal!


As reported on the previous page, the House Appropriations Committee conducted a study that compared Reagan's concrete proposals to what Congress actually passed, not what was spent afterwards. And it found that Reagan asked for $29.4 billion more than Congress passed


Reagan's Budget Proposals

 

[francoHFW]

the reaganut apologist hard at work as usual.

wonder when crusader retard will come along and start tooting Reagans horn as well.That guy takes it so personal and goes into meltdown when the truth is exposed about his idol.Much worse than stephanie does.

Here are some pesky little facts that stephanie,crusader retard and the other reaganut worshippers cant get around.actual facts being reported back then from the 1980's how reagan ruined the economy.they can only whine and cry in defeat how their hero has been exposed.



and here is a real in depth viewing of the most corrupt administration ever at the time in this one hour video.the author of this book really does an excellent job of exposing this fraud president.

That's awful!!!! Reagan added $1.6 trillion to the debt. Awful!

Obama added $7.5 trillion, so far. No big deal, eh comrade?

About the same in 2015 dollars DUH, and Reagan did it in "Good times". In fact that's how he did it, dumbass. ANOTHER fake Pub success...heard of S+L scandal bust/recession? Brainwashed functional MORONS.

About the same in 2015 dollars DUH, and Reagan did it in "Good times".

Not even close. Duh. And for Reagan's spending, we won the Cold War.
All of Obama's spending and he lost the ME to ISIS.
Great job, moron.

Gorby won the Cold War, not your demented actor.

Gorby won the Cold War, not your demented actor.

Yeah, when you have to pull tens of thousands of your troops back home and you lose all your conquered republics, that is a sure sign that you've won the Cold War. Shit, that's hilarious!!!

That's peristroika, glasnost, and democracy, hater dupe.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

That's awful!!!! Reagan added $1.6 trillion to the debt. Awful!

Obama added $7.5 trillion, so far. No big deal, eh comrade?

About the same in 2015 dollars DUH, and Reagan did it in "Good times". In fact that's how he did it, dumbass. ANOTHER fake Pub success...heard of S+L scandal bust/recession? Brainwashed functional MORONS.

About the same in 2015 dollars DUH, and Reagan did it in "Good times".

Not even close. Duh. And for Reagan's spending, we won the Cold War.
All of Obama's spending and he lost the ME to ISIS.
Great job, moron.

Gorby won the Cold War, not your demented actor.

Gorby won the Cold War, not your demented actor.

Yeah, when you have to pull tens of thousands of your troops back home and you lose all your conquered republics, that is a sure sign that you've won the Cold War. Shit, that's hilarious!!!

That's peristroika, glasnost, and democracy, hater dupe.

Yup, those were steps he took to try to stop his defeat.
He failed.

 

[francoHFW]

You are clueless as always.

 

[Dad2three]

Tear Down This Myth: Six Questions for Will Bunch


1. Your book describes itself as a deconstruction of the myth of Ronald Reagan. But how successful has the effort at myth-making been? How does Reagan now stack up among the presidents among historians and the public in general?



It’s interesting–Reagan’s reputation has risen with both the public and historians the further we get in memory from his actual presidency–which I think is a huge tribute to both the myth-making machinery created by the likes of Grover Norquist and the mainstream media’s willingness to embrace the myth.

For example, in March 1990, some 13 months after Reagan left the Oval Office, Reagan’s popularity (59 percent) had dipped below that of Jimmy Carter (62 percent). Two major surveys of historians in the mid-1990s rated Reagan’s presidency as below average, not one of the all-time greats.

Ironically, it was those historian rankings that inspired Norquist, the Heritage Foundation, and others to begin what became the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project–the group that aims to name schools, roads, etc., for the Gipper in every U.S. county–and related activities. A key part of that myth-building was the notion that Reagan was largely responsible for “winning the Cold War”–a premise that was rejected, according to a USA Today poll in 1989, when it was actually happening, by Americans crediting Mikhail Gorbachev for the reforms instead. You see the fruits of that effort today; professors–arguably eager to show they’re not tools of liberal bias–now rate Reagan as high as the Top Ten of U.S. presidents, and public opinion of the 40th president is fairly high as well.



2. Lincoln’s birthday passed last week. It was remarkable that few Republicans paused to notice or to note the importance of the nation’s first Republican president. Is there a relationship between the fading away of Lincoln as a Republican icon and the rise of Ronald Reagan?


It was stunning in the 2009 debate between candidates to become chair of the Republican National Committee; as some may recall, all six hopefuls quickly named Reagan as their favorite ex-president, and not one even paid token lip-service to Lincoln. The simplistic answer would be racism – i.e., lack of excitement that Lincoln’s legacy was ending slavery – but I do not think that’s the reason, certainly not overtly. It’s just that Reagan, especially the mythologized version pushed by 21st Century GOPers, relates more to the battles the right is still fighting today, such as the unending “culture wars” against liberal elites and efforts to portray Democrats as weak on defense. That makes him a more potent and more useful symbol than Lincoln, whose remarkable nineteenth-century achievements are more abstract and are generally things that all Americans support.



3. Reagan is often portrayed as an arms hawk who brought down the Soviet Union through aggressive military spending. Is this a tenable claim? Does it take into account his arms control efforts?

The Cold War and Soviet relations are central to the Reagan legacy/myth. The conservative story line is (not surprisingly) a rather simple one: Reagan came in and spent billions on an arms race that bankrupted the Soviets, while his bellicose rhetoric – “evil empire” and “tear down this wall!” – cowed its leaders into allowing the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Reality is more complicated. For one thing, the U.S. arms build-up began under Jimmy Carter and a lot of the spending proved ultimately wasteful. Now that we have access to historical material from the Kremlin, we also know that our most bellicose moves strengthened hardliners at the expense of Soviet reformers. Reagan was right about one thing: Communism was a soon-to-fail economic system, as a new generation of USSR leaders led by Gorbachev also realized. This is why most people at the time, and most historians today, give the lion’s share of credit for ending the Cold War to Gorbachev and to the reform efforts that he initiated, such as glasnost and perestroika.

That said, Reagan deserves praise for realizing that Gorbachev was indeed a different kind of Soviet leader, and for encouraging his reforms. Likewise, people should realize that Reagan’s aversion to nuclear weapons was a deeply held, personal belief which motivated some major accomplishments in arms reduction at the tail end of his presidency. These aspects of the real Reagan – a willingness to negotiate with enemies at the right time, and his real concerns about nuclear weapons – are the parts of Reagan’s legacy that progressives should actually embrace and use in today’s political debates.


Tear Down This Myth: Six Questions for Will Bunch | Harper's Magazine

 

[Dad2three]

From Booklist


Ronald Reagan who won the cold war, cut taxes, shrank the government, saved the economy, and was the most beloved president since FDR is a myth, Bunch says. The cold war fizzled out primarily because of Soviet economic collapse. Reagan cut taxes just once, in 1981, and thereafter raised them yearly. He vastly expanded the government and burdened the economy with enormous deficits. Moreover, his approval ratings were just average, reflecting his divisiveness as a political figure. Bunch also shows that however tough-talking, Reagan was a negotiator who achieved nuclear arms reductions by talking with Soviet leader Gorbachev and got into the Iran-Contra mess because he wouldn’t send combat troops abroad. In practice, especially of foreign policy, he was a pragmatist, not an ideologue. The truculent jingoist of the myth was concocted after Alzheimer’s silenced the man and the would-be juggernaut launched by the GOP’s 1994 election triumph crashed and burned before a Democratic president who shrank government and the deficit, balanced the budget, and even racked up surpluses. Bunch names the leading, venal mythmakers and shames the myth exploiters, too. Anyone interested in America’s immediate future should read this book. --Ray Olson


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001QIGZHC/?tag=ff0d01-20

 

[Dad2three]

Five myths about Ronald Reagan's legacy


1. Reagan was one of our most popular presidents.

It's true that Reagan is popular more than two decades after leaving office. A CNN/Opinion Research poll last month gave him the third-highest approval rating among presidents of the past 50 years, behind John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. But Reagan's average approval rating during the eight years that he was in office was nothing spectacular - 52.8 percent, according to Gallup. That places the 40th president not just behind Kennedy, Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower, but also Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush, neither of whom are talked up as candidates for Mount Rushmore.

During his presidency, Reagan's popularity had high peaks - after the attempt on his life in 1981, for example - and huge valleys. In 1982, as the national unemployment rate spiked above 10 percent, Reagan's approval rating fell to 35 percent. At the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, nearly one-third of Americans wanted him to resign.

In the early 1990s, shortly after Reagan left office, several polls found even the much-maligned Jimmy Carter to be more popular. Only since Reagan's 1994 disclosure that he had Alzheimer's disease - along with lobbying efforts by conservatives, such as Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which pushed to rename Washington's National Airport for the president - has his popularity steadily climbed.

2. Reagan was a tax-cutter.

3. Reagan was a hawk.

...Indeed, a USA Today poll taken four days after the fall of the Berlin Wall found that 43 percent of Americans credited Gorbachev, while only 14 percent cited Reagan.

With the exception of the 1986 bombing of Libya, Reagan also disappointed hawkish aides with his unwillingness to retaliate militarily for terrorism in the Middle East. According to biographer Lou Cannon, the president called the death of innocent civilians in anti-terror operations "terrorism itself."

4. Reagan shrank the federal government

This rhetorical flourish didn't stop the 40th president from increasing the federal government's size by every possible measure during his eight years in office.

Federal spending grew by an average of 2.5 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion. Many experts believe that Reagan's massive deficits not only worsened the recession of the early 1990s but doomed his successor, George H.W. Bush, to a one-term presidency by forcing him to abandon his "no new taxes" pledge.

The number of federal employees grew from 2.8 million to 3 million under Reagan


5.Reagan was a conservative culture warrior.

Reagan's contributions to the culture wars of the 1980s were largely rhetorical and symbolic.


Five myths about Ronald Reagan's legacy

 

[frigidweirdo]

Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever? | Consortiumnews

No shit. Sad its taken almost 30 years to realize this. The man destroyed America for normal every day Americans and set it on a path for the rich and only the rich.

Reagan got rid of Communism, so the story goes, he's a hero, only with Communism gone the right had nothing to put the fear of, well, Communism into people. So then they had to resort to invading Iraq and causing a major balls up there, causing things like ISIS.

He's a hero for getting rid of the best thing that ever happened to conservatism and then bringing on Bush who made the world so much less secure for people to live in, all in order to regain this Common Enemy.

 

[Dad2three]

The Irony and the Ecstasy

Every serious G.O.P. presidential aspirant invokes the glorious era of Ronald Reagan, to which the country must return. Ignore the fact that, for the likes of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul, Reagan’s actual record—from increased bureaucracy to higher deficits—should be seen as a complete failure.


..Things were pretty dire when Reagan took office back in 1981, as (PAUL) Ryan remembers it. But Reagan “was not defeated or deterred. Instead, he proposed a plan to get America back on track.”

Well, yes, in his speech to a joint session of Congress shortly after becoming president, Reagan presented his “plan”—a reasonably detailed discussion of proposed tax cuts and spending cuts, pursuant to his vision of smaller government. The thing is, almost none of these changes ever happened. The tax cuts went through in 1981 but were partially repealed in 1982. In his “plan,” Reagan promised to cut two Cabinet departments (Energy and Education). Instead he added one (Veterans Affairs, now the government’s second-largest). Ryan chooses to remember the Reagan of 1981, when anything was possible. This allows him to take Reagan’s promises as some kind of reality. Thirty-four years down the road, it’s too late for that.


Why Ronald Reagan Should Be Seen as a Complete Failure

 

[Dad2three]

Ronald Reagan Myth Doesn't Square with Reality


It's certainly true that Reagan entered office as a full-throated conservative vowing to cut both spending and taxes. And he quickly followed through on part of that promise, passing a major reduction in marginal tax rates. (According to author Lou Cannon, the top marginal rate fell from 70 percent when he came into office to 28 percent when he left.)

But following his party's losses in the 1982 election, Reagan largely backed off his efforts at spending cuts even as he continued to offer the small-government rhetoric that helped get him elected. In fact, he went in the opposite direction: His creation of the department of veterans affairs contributed to an increase in the federal workforce of more than 60,000 people during his presidency.

And while Reagan somewhat slowed the marginal rate of growth in the budget, it continued to increase during his time in office. So did the debt, skyrocketing from $700 billion to $3 trillion. Then there's the fact that after first pushing to cut Social Security benefits - and being stymied by Congress - Reagan in 1983 agreed to a $165 billion bailout of the program. He also massively expanded the Pentagon budget.


Meanwhile, following that initial tax cut, Reagan actually ended up raising taxes - eleven times. That's according to former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, a longtime Reagan friend who co-chaired President Obama's fiscal commission that last year offered a deficit reduction proposal.

"Ronald Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes," historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan's diaries, told NPR. "He knew that it was necessary at times. And so there's a false mythology out there about Reagan as this conservative president who came in and just cut taxes and trimmed federal spending in a dramatic way. It didn't happen that way. It's false."

It's important to note that Reagan's tax increases did not wipe out the effects of that initial tax cut. But they did eat up about half of it.


Ronald Reagan Myth Doesn't Square with Reality