Modbert
Daydream Believer
- Sep 2, 2008
- 33,178
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- #21
Totally pointless. People with triple lobotomies have better time understanding.
Reagan got a compromise! He asked for tax cuts, spending cuts and a military build up, he got 2 out of 3 and changed the course of history.
Blaming GOP for New Deal and Great Society programs that continue to soak 2/3 of the budget, that's fucking classic right there!
So wait, he asked for a military build up that merely helped to put us on the path we are today with a out of control military budget. Way to go Reagan!
Hmm, let's see what Lew Rockwell has to say. After all, he's pretty Libertarian.
Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy by Murray N. Rothbard
Dont try to get Ronnie off the hook by blaming Congress. Like the general public and all too many libertarians Congress was merely a passive receptacle for Ronnies wishes. Congress passed the Reagan budgets with a few marginal adjustments here and there and gave him virtually all the legislation, and ratified all the personnel, he wanted. For one Bork there are thousands who made it. The last eight years have been a Reagan Administration for the Gipper to make or break.
At first, the only "cut" was in Carters last-minute loony-tunes estimates for the future. But in a few short years, Reagans spending surpassed even Carters irresponsible estimates. Instead, Reagan not only increased government spending by an enormous amount so enormous that it would take a 40 percent cut to bring us back to Carters wild spending totals of 1980 he even substantially increased the percentage of government spending to GNP. Thats a "revolution"?
The much-heralded 1981 tax cut was more than offset by two tax increases that year. One was "bracket creep,
Creative semantics is the way in which Ronnie was able to keep his pledge never to raise taxes while raising them all the time. Reagans handlers, as we have seen, annoyed by the stubborn old coots sticking to "no new taxes," finessed the old boy by simply calling the phenomenon by a different name. If the Gipper was addled enough to fall for this trick, so did the American masses and a large chuck of libertarians and self-proclaimed free-market economists as well! "Lets close another loophole, Mr. President." "We-e-ell, OK, then, so long as were not raising taxes."
Is that what the highly touted "Reagan Revolution" amounts to, then? A tripling of the national debt?
Reagan worked to escalate toward infinity the insane "war against drugs." Far from the 1970s movement toward repealing marijuana laws, an ever greater flow of men and resources countless billions of dollars are being hysterically poured into combating a drug "problem" that clearly gets worse in direct proportion to the intensity of the "war."
And in the bedroom, too, if Ronnie has his way. Although abortion is not yet illegal, it is not for lack of effort by the Reagan Administration. The relentless Reaganite drive to conservatize the judiciary will likely recriminalize abortion soon, making criminals out of millions of American women each year. George Bush, for less than twenty-four glorious hours, was moved to take a consistent position: if abortion is murder, then all women who engage in abortion are murderers. But it took only a day for his handlers to pull George back from the abyss of logic, and to advocate only criminalizing the doctors, the hired hands of the women who get abortions.
On foreign policy, the best we can say about Ronnie is that he did not launch World War III. Apart from that, his foreign policy was a series of murdering blunders
As we all know only too well, the height of Reagans Teflon qualities came with Iran-Contra. At the time, I naïvely thought that the scandal would finish the bastard off. But no one saw anything wrong with the Administrations jailing private arms salesmen to Iran, while at the very same time engaging in arms sales to Iran itself.
You say you want a Revolution..