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How would you rank Ronald Reagan's presidency on a scale of 1 to 10?


State whether you're left, right or independent.

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Reagan's "voodoo" economic policy, where tax cuts were believed to somehow generate tax revenues, failed to account for his administration's excessive spending which increased from $591 billion in 1980 to $1.2 trillion in 1990. [45] [46] Reagan both increased and cut taxes. In 1980, middle-income families with children paid 8.2% in income taxes and 9.5% in payroll taxes. By 1988 their income tax was down to 6.6%, but payroll tax was up to 11.8%, a combined increase in taxes. [24] Reagan pushed through Social Security tax increases of $165 billion over seven years.
Reagan opposed many important civil rights measures that further alienated him and the Republican Party from African-Americans. On Mar. 16, 1988, Reagan vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act. He was opposed to extending provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He initially opposed making Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. He was also loyal to apartheid South Africa, considering that country a friend and ally.

Need I say my opinion of raygun?

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8.5

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Reagan's a three. He was appropriately christened an "amiable dunce."

His most memorable and lasting "accomplishment" will be the Reagan Debt. He sold the public on voodoo economics, which still haunts us. Cheney famously observed, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." The Republican Party went all-in on the redistribution of wealth -- except they chose to redistribute from future generations. A little bit of intergenerational tyranny that each succeeding cohort now wishes to exact on the children of tomorrow.

The poster above had a hilarious satirical post when he credited Reagan for defeating communism with "Rollback" -- as if the US had for not decades offered official and covert support to third world countries and insurgents. Reagan's distinguished because he secretly sold arms to Iran -- and by secret I mean without notifying Congress -- then used the proceeds to fund death squads in Nicaragua (which was famously "three days drive from Texas" -- meaning we needed to worry about invasion). I think it was someone in Reagan's cabinet who said RED DAWN was the most realisitic movie about the Cold War ever made. Anyway, Iran Contra was a bigger scandal than Watergate, and Reagan got away with it by plausibly pleading he was a remiss executive who didn't know what was happening on his watch. He did, after all, fall asleep in meetings and confused movies with real life.

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Hogwash. 😄 Pretending the Democrat House had nothing to do with the debt is one thing, but downplaying the transition from containment to rollback as general Cold War strategy is clownish revisionism.

They’ve literally built statues honoring Reagan in Eastern European nations for a reason. Democrats certainly opposed Reagan's actions at the time, as your own warped description of the Contra-freedom fighters' struggle against the communist Sandinistas unwittingly hints at. Suggesting Nixon era "Detente" or Carter era stupid naivete, both of which let the USSR thrive longer than it otherwise might have, was equivalent to Reagan's paradigm shifting, broad spectrum pressure campaign is laughable. Even the Vietnam and Korean Wars were defensive in nature.

Reagan changed the US policy goal from "coexistence" to summing up the Cold War as "We win. They lose." He correctly argued as early as the 1960s that the Soviet structure wasn't built to code, and could be toppled with external pressure from measures like a massive US arms buildup. Contrast that with leading leftist "intellectuals" like Paul Samuelson, whose textbook "Economics" (the most used college economics textbook in the country during the 20th Century), wrongly predicted the USSR would surpass the US in GDP (he kept pushing the date this would happen out in later editions), and wrote as late as 1989(!) that, "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive." (Economics, 13th ed.; how little Democrats have changed.)

Reagan demoralized and financially bled dry the Soviet empire, disillusioning its leadership class from any notion that their system could compete with the USA. He recast the Cold War as a moral struggle for human rights, instead of a practical disagreement between two morally equivalent foes who disagree, putting PR obsessed Moscow on the defensive for the first time in decades.

He flipped the tables in Afghanistan, where a large number of Soviets were being directly killed. He aggressively supported anti-Marxist movements from Nicaraguan Contras to Poland’s Solidarity (Polish hero Lech Walesa credits Reagan with winning the Cold War). He ousted the Cuban-backed Marxist dictator in Grenada with a direct US invasion, robbing the Cuban/Moscow alliance of the strategic hope that they could flip the entire Caribbean piece by piece in the face of a complacent US. Grenada, a stable, free democracy ever since, still celebrates the US liberation as their “Thanksgiving Day”.

Supporting all these failing clients was increasingly costing Moscow money. Even the South Africa apartheid Democrat talking point someone repeated here was just the administration not ending all support for South Africa in the face of an insurgency by the communist ANC. Reagan, of course, opposed apartheid and racial discrimination. Communism is even worse. Ask Ethiopians, whose communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam made them the poster child for 80s famine, and who was later convicted of genocide by an Ethiopian court. Opportunistic Democrats lied about Reagan’s stance on apartheid.

The Reagan CIA cleverly fed disinformation to the massive Soviet industrial espionage program desperately trying to steal US technology. They slightly altered blueprints enough to sabotage them in an array of fields, most famously resulting in the explosion of a Siberian pipeline that was vital to the Soviet economy. Reagan’s energy policy (and diplomacy with Saudi Arabia) reduced the global price of oil, further squeezing the USSR.

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Reagan’s SDI program (mocked by Democrats as “Star Wars”) rejected mutually assured destruction as immoral and scared the hell out of the Soviet leadership, including Gorbachev. Advanced missile defense was a strategic game changer. He tried every diplomatic trick he could to get the US to end it, but Reagan refused, showing he would rather sacrifice the positive PR of an arms deal than lose that program (the opposite of the craven, self absorbed Obama/Clinton mind set). The Russians publicly whined about it but secretly pursued their own missile defense program, which met with spectacular failure in the late 1980s. That may have been the final straw because they knew they couldn’t build SDI but had no reason to think the Americans couldn’t. Nor could they compete with Reagan America in any area.

Their leadership class lost faith in the communist system and knew the only option at that point was managing their surrender in the Cold War. Arms deals were made after all, on Reagan’s terms. Relations improved as the communist empire crumbled. The Polish Solidarity movement Reagan had aided toppled their communist regime, without intervention from Moscow unlike revolutions put down by Soviet tanks in previous decades. People spontaneously tore down the Berlin Wall, as Reagan had called for. With no more raison detre, the Soviet Union itself soon dissolved.


All that’s not the result of containment and coexistence, but aggressive rollback strategy.

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Thanks for the laugh.

The Democratic House certainly deserves blame for the Reagan Debt -- they passed the tax cuts. Your comic book revisionism here reminds me of Hollywood: For any grand event in history, just say Americans did it. You want to talk about the fall of Communism and mention Gorbachev only once, and in passing. Protestors do not get mentioned at all. I hope you copy/pasted. The only way someone could type all of that nonsense is if he were going for a blackbelt in cluelessness. You want to say the Soviet economic system is fundamentally flawed, but it dies from unique exogenous pressure by Saint Reagan. The Democrats are blamed for spending -- and Reagan's credited for outspending Communism. What an incoherent mess.

Reagan gets credit for "flip[ping] the tables in Afghanistan." Well, he certainly compared the Mujhadeen to America's Founding Fathers (thanks, Bin Laden), but that policy began in Carter's era of "stupid naivete," and was continued under Reagan. You omit mention of Reagan pissing off hardened anti-Communists when he "naively" trusted Gorbachev for arms control agreements.

I'm going to save your posts. They could be useful if I ever need to assassinate a serious historian.

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What a half-assed, moronic response, but thanks for tipping the anti-American chip on your shoulder. You have a grade school, one layer understanding of things at best. Sure, Gorbachev appeared in a vacuum. It's not like a desperate Soviet Union turned to a young reformer because they were buckling under the strain and losing faith in their system or anything, just as the Reagan administration predicted early on (not specifically who, but a "young reformer" type). A system can be flawed and still survive indefinitely without competition and pressure to expose and exploit its flaws.

You think cutting taxes alone causes debt, not spending. That's brilliant, lol. Reagan deserves all the credit for military spending (I never said otherwise), but not for domestic spending he otherwise would have cut if Democrats didn't control the House. You're so ignorant you lump every Afghan carrying a gun in as the "Mujhadeen". Most of the Mujahideen we aided who were still active a decade later were in the Northern Alliance. The Taliban wasn't formed until the mid 90s and was a younger crowd who came from Pakistani Madrassas (Taliban means "student"). Bin Laden was an independent foreigner in the 80s with an exaggerated reputation who did not receive CIA aid. He formed Al Qaeda at the end of the war, and ultimately helped the Taliban against our Majahideen allies in the Northern Alliance whom the US had abandoned in the 90s.

You're also too ignorant to know that the most of the Soviet fighting was in the north while most of the US fighting has been in southern Pashto regions. You just see Afghans as dark skinned people with head dresses holding rifles and shouting incoherently. They're all the same to you.

Gorbachev had his stupid naivety partially stripped away by the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but the aid he offered was pitiful. Reagan greatly ramped it up into a serious effort and included the most effective weapons, stinger missiles.

By the late 80s Reagan knew things were going our way. Arms deals, as long as they were on our terms, could give Gorbachev credibility, let reforms toward freedom maintain traction, and improve relations, lessening the chances of things blowing up as the Soviet empire collapsed.



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Oh. My. God.

You have no idea how someone becomes the General Secretary. You just have a thesis -- because Reagan -- and then strain to invent a cause for an effect.

Let's bring back context.
Me: Reagan Debt.
You: Congress deserves blame.
Me: Yeah, for going along with Reagan's tax cuts.
"You think cutting taxes alone causes debt, not spending."

We had Democratic control of the House during the Carter years without sky-rocketing debt. What changed? You're also unable to keep your propaganda straight: "Supply-Side Economics" contended that tax cuts would INCREASE government revenue. However, as it turns out, tax increases without spending cuts typically lead to tax hikes on future generations.

Your bullshit inferences do not end there. You went on an ill-advised digression about Afghanistan. Who said anything about the Taliban? All of this is misdirection for your face-plant -- criticizing Carter and praising Reagan when the former began the policy continued by the latter.

"By the late 80s Reagan knew things were going our way."

Reagan justified military expansion by claiming we were losing ground to the mighty Soviet Union, but then he signed treaties because he knew we had them? Uh-huh. He wasn't at all reacting to the domestic political situation (mounting debt/tax reform, Iran-Contra, S&L scandal). It's not like Republicans lost control of the Senate in '86. Slobbering hagiography is not history.

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You actually came back to double down on your ignorance, LOL? Your new reply was even stupider than your previous one. You're the one who faceplanted by claiming I hadn’t mentioned "protesters" after I had discussed the Polish Solidarity movement, the key protesters in ending the Cold War, and its leader Lech Walesa (a Nobel Peace Prize recipient back when that award still meant something) by name. 😄 You clearly don’t even know what the Solidarity union was or you wouldn’t have made that snarky “protesters” comment, douchebag. As for that heroic leader here’s what he has to say on the topic:

Lech Walesa: ”When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can’t be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989.”

http://www.tommyduggan.com/VP070204lech.html

"I wonder whether today's Poland, Europe and world could look the same without president Reagan," Walesa said. "As a participant in those events, I must say that it's inconceivable."

https://www.foxnews.com/world/poland-unveils-statue-of-ronald-reagan-in-warsaw

“He did not mention ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in power from 1985 to 1991, and far less well-regarded in Moscow's former stamping ground than in Western Europe. Mr Gorbachev also worked to temper Cold War tensions, and his reforms included giving satellites more say – but they also remember four decades of Soviet domination.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/8904456/Ronald-Reagan-statue-unveiled-in-Warsaw.html

Perhaps you feel those erecting statues to Reagan in Eastern Europe are simply starting with a “because Reagan” thesis and straining to “invent a cause for an effect”, you partisan clown.

Of course I know how the USSR system worked, and you failed to even make a point about the General Secretary, moron. It's like you started with a half baked idea and lost your train of thought.

You have poor reading comprehension and can't maintain a logically coherent argument.

I laid out several specific policies Reagan enacted that ramped up pressure on the Soviet Union on a variety of fronts, and you just ignore that evidence. Your thesis is "Reagan bad", and you cover your eyes and ears and repeat that thesis like a chant in lieu of an actual argument. Reagan ramped up military spending not primarily because we were losing ground to the Soviets, but to force them into a more intense arms race they couldn't keep up in due to their inferior system, a strategy he had been advocating since the 1960s. This isn't ex post facto. Reagan predicted the Soviet empire would collapse if his strategy was implemented, his (mostly leftist) critics disagreed (why I quoted the Samuelson quote as an example, which you of course completely ignored), and Reagan was proved right. Reagan's vision passed the empirical test of reality. Leftist experts' didn't. I educated you on Afghanistan because you pulled that simple minded Democrat stunt of tying "Bin Laden" (and implicitly the 21st Century War on Terror) to the Mujahideen. While Bin Laden was technically (and peripherally) involved in the war, so were lots of other factions from around the world and that doesn't mean we created Al Qaeda (let alone the Taliban), that aiding the rebels wasn't worth it to take down the Soviet empire, or that the 1990s events in the country that led to the Taliban rising and the 9/11 attacks were a necessary consequence of the 80s rebellion. It's more directly a result of the US abandoning Afghanistan in the 90s, at least to the extent Washington has any blame.

Carter began Afghan funding in 1979 with $630k, pitiful even then. Reagan ramped it up to over $600 million by the climax. The first stinger missiles, by far the most decisive weapon in that effort, were delivered by the Reagan administration in 1986. Pretending Reagan was just continuing a Carter program is comically dishonest.

I’m not sure if they’ve ever erected statues to Jimmy Carter in (post communist) Eastern Europe, LOL.

As for your screeching stupidity and dishonesty on our debt exchange, what I really said was you couldn’t exempt the Democratic Congress from blame too, or just blame tax cuts for what’s really a spending problem. In fact tax revenue did increase after the tax cuts just as the Reagan team predicted. The deficits were larger than before because the Democrats controlled Congress and prevented Reagan from pairing his military spending increases with domestic spending cuts. Both sides got the spending they wanted, which eclipsed the revenue gains from the tax cut-fueled booming economy. No administration is perfect or gets everything it wants, but, as your posting helpfully illustrates, it’s hard to competently argue against the reality that Reagan was amazingly successful on the primary issues.










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I give Reagan a 1 because of Antonin Scalia, the only one of Reagan's three Supreme Court appointments to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Even the hated Yalie George H.W. Bush had a 50% success rate.

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Left, and I'd give him a 7.5 or an 8.

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5, maybe 6 at best. No minimum wage increases for a whole decade. He was the catalyst for their stagnation. In today's dollars we were making $11 an hour in the 1960s and 1970s with nobody complaining about it or calling it a problem. Then Reagan happened and suddenly we can't afford it any more. He just sat back and let inflation do its thang.

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"Let inflation do its thang", LOL? Aside from the fact that the government not imposing artificial minimum wages from above likely fueled the era's explosive job growth (supply and demand 101), do you credit Reagan at all for conquering the soaring inflation that had become a huge problem by the late 70s? Under Reagan inflation went from double digits to low single digits and we've enjoyed relative price stability ever since. NY Times chief economics writer Paul Krugman predicted the opposite at the time, btw.

Reagan's tax reforms also included indexing brackets to inflation for the first time, ending the inflationary bracket creep that was becoming an increasingly big problem. It was Reagan's Keynesian predecessors who were sitting back letting "inflation do its thang", including kicking Americans with automatic tax increases as those "high" tax brackets suddenly weren't so high and they were pushed into them.





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I credit Reagan for stagnating wages during that inflation. He didn't counter inflation at all. I also credit Reagan for leaving office with a deficit that forced HW to raise taxes.

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Then you're poorly informed on the facts.

Average Annual CPI (Inflation)
1980 - 13.5%
1988 - 4.1%

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/

Wages rose, despite a larger percentage of the population working than ever before in peacetime (including a majority of women for the first time, and lots of immigrants), meaning new, entry level jobs skewing down the stats. The massive drop in inflation and consumer goods innovations fueled by the deregulated economy freeing up led to a seemingly endless variety of choices at increasingly affordable prices, and a big jump in living standards. Employee compensation also increasingly included benefits packages instead of just traditional wages.

Reagan won 49 states in 1984 because people felt the undeniable economic boom.

I don't mind someone raising the deficit as a criticism of something Reagan wasn't able to accomplish, but it's stingy of you not to give any "credit" to Democrats for blocking spending cuts (which no one "forced" them to do).

But sure, ultra. I know liberals like you are all about opposing the deficit. 😄

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Reagan sucked. Raising taxes fixed some of the problem. Bush created another by lowering taxes. Obama made the mistake of making them permanent. Trump lowered them again which is why the economy fluctuates continuously. Entitlement programs were fine until taxes were lowered. Now all the right can do is whine that we can't afford them. But we can afford to give the 1% more tax cuts and put ourselves further into debt, but if entitlement programs increase by one penny the GOP raises the pitchforks.

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Reagan sucked...Trump lowered them again which is why the economy fluctuates continuously.

Reagan was awesome but your understanding of economics sucks. Not even leftist economic theories argue that tax cuts hurt the economy.

Obama raised taxes, posted record shattering deficits, and entitlement programs were still on their course toward insolvency even back then because of the big demographic changes since the FDR era (apart from Obamacare raiding Medicare funding). The problem is those programs were sold even by FDR as temporary. Since then we've gone from about 12 or so workers per retiree to around 3 workers per retiree as the population's average age has increased. Heck, originally the retirement age was above the average life expectancy.

Social Security and Medicare are anachronistic, big government programs born from mid 20th Century thinking that should have been replaced long ago. Poison pills threatening to fiscally wreck the US long term. But don't mention reforming the "third rail" programs, even in ways that would greatly improve returns and let low income families accumulate wealth, or the Democrats and leftist media attack dogs whine and raise their pitchforks.

The deficit was growing by the beginning of the 2000s regardless of the Bush tax cut (which was mostly phased in for later years), if you're trying to imply otherwise, especially (but not only because) of 9/11. Clinton and (I'm fair) Gingrich scrapping the US military in the 90s, while enjoying an internet, capital gains tax cut-fueled boom, benefiting from the post Cold War "peace dividend" (thanks Reagan!), and Republicans blocking Clinton's big spending agenda led to a temporary deficit shrinkage, but that was already poised to reverse with the economic downturn starting in 2000, and non-discretionary domestic spending blowing up into a higher percentage of the budget. Meanwhile the inept foreign/military policy of the 90s led directly to 9/11 and the disastrous threats we had to deal with this century.

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Reagan was a Democrat who become disgusted with his party and ran to the red.

Sounds very familiar today.

How anyone can align with antifa, LGBTQ, BLM, muslims, Hollyweird, illegal aliens which are the base of democratic voters is beyond me.

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Based on my memory as a child and HS kid I'd give him a 7.

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