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Reagan: Killer, Coward, Con-man
- Thread starter u2scram
- Start date
Finding reliable employees has never been easier.
You obviously have zero management experience. Why did you weigh in on something you obviously know nothing about? Or you actually believe that being a Democrat and parroting their views makes you an expert in all things, LOL?
lg325
Diamond Member
A discussion with both Reagan and RFK taking questions from members of the global press.
- Mar 1, 2008
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this debunks the babble of a reagan worshipper earlier that it was just a mere mistake on Reagans part putting Fauchi in office,he knew clearly he was demonic and evil signing this bill in 1986 WHICH IS SEEN IN LIVE FOOTAGE that made vaccine companys exempt from prosecution from vaccine injurys.
yeah great president looking out for the people alright.
BEAM ME UP SCOTTY,THERE IS NO INTELLIGENT LIFE FORMS ON THIS PLANET.
yeah great president looking out for the people alright.
BEAM ME UP SCOTTY,THERE IS NO INTELLIGENT LIFE FORMS ON THIS PLANET.
Last edited:
- Mar 1, 2008
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the REAL truth on motherfucker Reagan exposed.
fortheleft.blogspot.com
www.salon.com
www.beggarscanbechoosers.com
www.usmessageboard.com
reagan ballooned the deficit.
Supreme Court denies RNC bid to end voter fraud consent decree
www.npr.org
Before that 1986 Income Tax Reform Fuck Job, Mrs Clean and I were claiming 10 exemptions between us and breaking even at tax time.
Since then, we've had to cut back to zero exemptions and write the IRS a check every year.
Reagan, fuck him!
Reagan and the press...
When President Reagan first took over the oval office, we would throw questions at President Reagan, and he would answer them.
Well, his three top aides were apoplectic. They didnt know what was coming out of his mouth. They taught the president to say this is not a press conference, and they had him quite trained on that.
And one day we asked him what was happening, and he said to us: I cant answer that. We said why?
Because they wont let me, he pointed to Baker, Meese and Deaver standing behind, very grim.
They wont let meI said, but youre the President
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The excuse cannot be used that Congress massively increased Reagan's budget proposals. On the contrary, there was never much difference between Reagan's and Congress's budgets, and despite propaganda to the contrary, Reagan never proposed a cut in the total budget."
Murray N. Rothbard - former Dean of the Austrian School, an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher
"The debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."
David Stockman - Director of the Office of Management and Budget for U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
At a comparable time in the Reagan administration unemployment stood at about 7.5% and his popularity was also comparable to Obama.
How soon we forget. Indeed.
Reagan's Betrayal of the Middle Class Comes to Full Fruition
A blog about politics, economics, feminist issues, war and peace, empire, military rape, Obama, Israel, feminism, news of the day, political analysis
fortheleft.blogspot.com
How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan
With the Gipper's reputation flagging after Clinton, neoconservatives launched a stealthy campaign to remake him as a "great" president.
www.salon.com
How Ronald Reagan Unwittingly Laid the Groundwork for the Death of Capitalism
By MARC McDONALD Thanks to tireless efforts by historical revisionists over the past two decades, Ronald Reagan has gotten a lot of credit f...
Newsflash: Ronald Reagan Raised Taxes (You Idiots)
Reagan continued these "modest rollbacks" in his second term. The historic Tax Reform Act of 1986, though it achieved the supply side goal of lowering individual income tax rates, was a startlingly progressive reform. The plan imposed the largest corporate tax increase in historyan act utterly...
www.usmessageboard.com
reagan ballooned the deficit.
Supreme Court denies RNC bid to end voter fraud consent decree
A Reagan Legacy: Amnesty For Illegal Immigrants
As the nation's attention turns back to the fractured debate over immigration, it might be helpful to remember that in 1986, Ronald Reagan signed a sweeping immigration reform bill into law. The bill made nearly 3 million illegal immigrants eligible for amnesty -- a word not usually associated...
www.npr.org
Before that 1986 Income Tax Reform Fuck Job, Mrs Clean and I were claiming 10 exemptions between us and breaking even at tax time.
Since then, we've had to cut back to zero exemptions and write the IRS a check every year.
Reagan, fuck him!
Reagan and the press...
When President Reagan first took over the oval office, we would throw questions at President Reagan, and he would answer them.
Well, his three top aides were apoplectic. They didnt know what was coming out of his mouth. They taught the president to say this is not a press conference, and they had him quite trained on that.
And one day we asked him what was happening, and he said to us: I cant answer that. We said why?
Because they wont let me, he pointed to Baker, Meese and Deaver standing behind, very grim.
They wont let meI said, but youre the President
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The excuse cannot be used that Congress massively increased Reagan's budget proposals. On the contrary, there was never much difference between Reagan's and Congress's budgets, and despite propaganda to the contrary, Reagan never proposed a cut in the total budget."
Murray N. Rothbard - former Dean of the Austrian School, an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher
"The debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."
David Stockman - Director of the Office of Management and Budget for U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
At a comparable time in the Reagan administration unemployment stood at about 7.5% and his popularity was also comparable to Obama.
How soon we forget. Indeed.
Last edited:
- Mar 1, 2008
- 49,931
- 17,316
- 2,250
Ronald Reagan was a Grade-B movie actor whose perfectly mundane and artificially likeable persona transported him to the status of Man From General Electric, then eventually to a starring role as President Of the United States. To believe this posturing, flag-waving boob was anything other than a moderately skilled pretender who performed with deliberate obedience to his scripted purpose as corporatist water-carrier is to demonstrate the kind of simple-minded naivete which gradually has emerged as a malignant and quietly menacing growth on the body of American politics.
Briefly stated, Ronald Reagan was one of the worst things that ever happened to America. Not only because of the economic damage caused by the policies he managed to impose on us but because of the false impression he managed to convey to the receptive minds and imaginations of a veritable cult of jingoistic disciples who continue to regard him as a good President and a good American. What Ronald Reagan really was is a second-rate Hollywood character who happened to be exactly what the faltering corporatocracy was looking for to replace the weakened and vulnerable Carter presidency and to hoodwink a population already partially brainwashed by the input of electronically induced fantasy.
The Ronald Reagan story is a factual demonstration of the hypnotic effect the movies and television can have on a national population. And those who would like to better understand how the phenomenon works need only read Marshal MacLuhan's classic work, The Medium Is The Message.
Reagan's promises
1. Reduce federal spending
2. Reduce income taxes
3. Reduce regulation
4. Reduce inflation
Reagan's actual performance as rated when he left office (some records have been broken)
1. Promise to reduce federal spending
a. Tripled national debt from $900kk to $2.8kkk in eight years, raising it from 26%GDP to 41%GDP; before Reagan the fastest tripling of peacetime national debt took 31 years
b. Doubled foreign aid $10kk to $22kk
c. 53% increase in on budget federal spending; 60% gross increase in federal spending
d. 230,000 more CIVILIAN federal employees
e. Doubled subsidies to defense firms lobbying congress
f. More than doubled farm subsidies
g. Doubled subsidies to educational unions
h. Signed pay parity bills
2. Reduce income taxes create prosperity
a. Largest across the board tax increase in US history (TERFA) 1982
b. Largest middle class tax increase in US history (TRA) 1986
c. Unemployment AVERAGED 7.5%, the highest ever eight year average
d. Real rate of GDP growth 2.8% vs 3.4% under Carter
e. Productivity growth 1.4% vs 1.9% under Carter
3. Reduce regulation
a. First federal bailout of private banks (S&Ls)
b. First federal bailouts of Wall Street (FED buying private sector securities)
c. Increased ethanol subsidies (1984, from 50c to 60c/gal)
d. Offered blanket pardon to eight million illegal aliens; 2.9 million took him up but all benefited.
e. Opened borders to cheap Asian goods (Taiwan, Japan then) at cost of millions of US jobs
4. Reduce inflation
a. Borrowed money to hide the inflationary effects of changing economy toward asset base
b. Changed character of US job base from industrial to retail (MLM type instead of production)
c. Changed statistical bases for recording official economic situation numbers
Summary on Reagan
Reagan delivered higher taxes to working class Americans, lower taxes on people and corporations exploiting American workers, and he did it with a smile, hitting every mark on his stage. In sum Reagan was a shallow thinking gladhanding corporate shill; Otis Chandler hired him to beat Pat Brown in California, then handed his boy off to Don Regan. Reagan's stage managers kept him center stage shadow boxing a bankrupt and tottering empire to the applause of halfwit America, while they worked behind the scenes with corrupt congresses to loot the federal treasury. By the time he left office WF Buckley and Barry Goldwater had come to regret ever supporting Reagan. All that kept them silent in public was their own complicity in electing someone that stupid and weak.
A footnote: Reagan's acting chops were not recognized in life; in real time he fooled that segment who could be fooled. That was then. An important measure of the worth of a person is whether they continue to buy the Legend of Ronald Reagan or not.
3. The USSR was bankrupt when Reagan was elected. They couldn't even afford hormone shots for the East German "women's" Olympic teams by 1980. The idea the USSR were going to nuke America was popular only among people seeking something to fear. That sort of trait has definitely been traced to genetic defect. If Reagan had focused on industry instead of making up war stories and playing with his plastic soldiers he might have amounted to something in real life instead of just inside the heads of delusional neocons.
Who's the dunce, here, babe? Someone stupid enough to believe Reagan turned the economy around, or someone that understands the horsepower of the greatest industrial nation ever to be sold out by a bobble headed idiot?
If you have enough emotional self control to read the facts on Reagan here they are:
1. Tripled the debt
2. Signed pay parity bills
3. Expanded the federal government in size and power while at the same time convincing morons he was doing the opposite
4. First finance sector bailouts (S&Ls, and it was during Reagan's presidency that the Fed started buying private sector paper for the purpose of propping up markets - all the while braying about the purity of markets).
5. Expanded direct corporate welfare beyond Nixon's "revenue sharing" horseshit to state and local governments, possibly the stupidest people ever to bumble into "other people's money".
6. Continued on purpose what the moron, LBJ, started by accident - returning the MIC to the biggest lobby buying congressscum
7. Lied about his military service (although by the time he praised Nazi war heroes at Bitzberg, he was getting senile).
What can possibly be more cliched than gaggles of halfwits following a charismatic to a bad place, then spending the rest of their lives in denial and publicly suppressing buyer's remorse by bragging about their love of the charismatic?
All in all, while bovine America basked in the evangelical skills of a man wrapped in the flag and surrounded by religious nuts, many rational Americans understood that corporations had finally got their man into the white house.
The only reason I paid any attention to the man was to see if a big time Democrat would blow him on camera. For those with the chops to run the numbers and connect cause-effect dots, it can't be missed that it was during the Reagan presidency that America lost its way. All it takes is integrity to admit it. Go ahead, try it. One imagines it won't be the worst morning after of your life.
Reagan was the embodiment of the 'welfare queen' he chided. Reagan was the most fiscally irresponsible president in our history. Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt.
Ironic you quote Murray Rothbard...
The Myths of Reaganomics
Mises Daily: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 by Murray N. Rothbard
I come to bury Reaganomics, not to praise it.
How well has Reaganomics achieved its own goals? Perhaps the best way of discovering those goals is to recall the heady days of Ronald Reagan's first campaign for the presidency, especially before his triumph at the Republican National Convention in 1980. In general terms, Reagan pledged to return, or advance, to a free market and to "get government off our backs."
Specifically, Reagan called for a massive cut in government spending, an even more drastic cut in taxation (particularly the income tax), a balanced budget by 1984 (that wild-spender, Jimmy Carter you see, had raised the budget deficit to $74 billion a year, and this had to be eliminated), and a return to the gold standard, where money is supplied by the market rather than by government. In addition to a call for free markets domestically, Reagan affirmed his deep commitment to freedom of international trade. Not only did the upper echelons of the administration sport Adam Smith ties, in honor of that moderate free-trader, but Reagan himself affirmed the depth of the influence upon him of the mid-19th century laissez-faire economist, Frederic Bastiat, whose devastating and satiric attacks on protectionism have been anthologized in economics readings ever since.
The gold standard was the easiest pledge to dispose of. President Reagan appointed an allegedly impartial gold commission to study the problem—a commission overwhelmingly packed with lifelong opponents of gold. The commission presented its predictable report, and gold was quickly interred.
Let's run down the other important areas:
Government Spending. How well did Reagan succeed in cutting government spending, surely a critical ingredient in any plan to reduce the role of government in everyone's life? In 1980, the last year of free-spending Jimmy Carter the federal government spent $591 billion. In 1986, the last recorded year of the Reagan administration, the federal government spent $990 billion, an increase of 68%. Whatever this is, it is emphatically not reducing government expenditures.
Sophisticated economists say that these absolute numbers are an unfair comparison, that we should compare federal spending in these two years as percentage of gross national product. But this strikes me as unfair in the opposite direction, because the greater the amount of inflation generated by the federal government, the higher will be the GNP. We might then be complimenting the government on a lower percentage of spending achieved by the government's generating inflation by creating more money. But even taking these percentages of GNP figures, we get federal spending as percent of GNP in 1980 as 21.6%, and after six years of Reagan, 24.3%. A better comparison would be percentage of federal spending to net private product, that is, production of the private sector. That percentage was 31.1% in 1980, and a shocking 34.3% in 1986. So even using percentages, the Reagan administration has brought us a substantial increase in government spending.
Also, the excuse cannot be used that Congress massively increased Reagan's budget proposals. On the contrary, there was never much difference between Reagan's and Congress's budgets, and despite propaganda to the contrary, Reagan never proposed a cut in the total budget.
Deficits. The next, and admittedly the most embarrassing, failure of Reaganomic goals is the deficit. Jimmy Carter habitually ran deficits of $40-50 billion and, by the end, up to $74 billion; but by 1984, when Reagan had promised to achieve a balanced budget, the deficit had settled down comfortably to about $200 billion, a level that seems to be permanent, despite desperate attempts to cook the figures in one-shot reductions.
This is by far the largest budget deficit in American history. It is true that the $50 billion deficits in World War II were a much higher percentage of the GNP; but the point is that that was a temporary, one-shot situation, the product of war finance. But the war was over in a few years; and the current federal deficits now seem to be a recent, but still permanent part of the American heritage.
One of the most curious, and least edifying, sights in the Reagan era was to see the Reaganites completely change their tune of a lifetime. At the very beginning of the Reagan administration, the conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, convinced that deficits would disappear immediately, received a terrific shock when they were asked by the Reagan administration to vote for the usual annual increase in the statutory debt limit. These Republicans, some literally with tears in their eyes, protested that never in their lives had they voted for an increase in the national debt limit, but they were doing it just this one time because they "trusted Ronald Reagan" to balance the budget from then on. The rest, alas, is history, and the conservative Republicans never saw fit to cry again. Instead, they found themselves adjusting rather easily to the new era of huge permanent deficits. The Gramm-Rudman law, allegedly designed to eradicate deficits in a few years, has now unsurprisingly bogged down in enduring confusion.
As for Reagan, conservatives view him as their only representative. However, as has been said, he enlarged government, and did not limit it. He increased the debt, and did not reduce it.
The Myths of Reaganomics - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily
Reagan was such a visionary
www.salon.com
Briefly stated, Ronald Reagan was one of the worst things that ever happened to America. Not only because of the economic damage caused by the policies he managed to impose on us but because of the false impression he managed to convey to the receptive minds and imaginations of a veritable cult of jingoistic disciples who continue to regard him as a good President and a good American. What Ronald Reagan really was is a second-rate Hollywood character who happened to be exactly what the faltering corporatocracy was looking for to replace the weakened and vulnerable Carter presidency and to hoodwink a population already partially brainwashed by the input of electronically induced fantasy.
The Ronald Reagan story is a factual demonstration of the hypnotic effect the movies and television can have on a national population. And those who would like to better understand how the phenomenon works need only read Marshal MacLuhan's classic work, The Medium Is The Message.
Reagan's promises
1. Reduce federal spending
2. Reduce income taxes
3. Reduce regulation
4. Reduce inflation
Reagan's actual performance as rated when he left office (some records have been broken)
1. Promise to reduce federal spending
a. Tripled national debt from $900kk to $2.8kkk in eight years, raising it from 26%GDP to 41%GDP; before Reagan the fastest tripling of peacetime national debt took 31 years
b. Doubled foreign aid $10kk to $22kk
c. 53% increase in on budget federal spending; 60% gross increase in federal spending
d. 230,000 more CIVILIAN federal employees
e. Doubled subsidies to defense firms lobbying congress
f. More than doubled farm subsidies
g. Doubled subsidies to educational unions
h. Signed pay parity bills
2. Reduce income taxes create prosperity
a. Largest across the board tax increase in US history (TERFA) 1982
b. Largest middle class tax increase in US history (TRA) 1986
c. Unemployment AVERAGED 7.5%, the highest ever eight year average
d. Real rate of GDP growth 2.8% vs 3.4% under Carter
e. Productivity growth 1.4% vs 1.9% under Carter
3. Reduce regulation
a. First federal bailout of private banks (S&Ls)
b. First federal bailouts of Wall Street (FED buying private sector securities)
c. Increased ethanol subsidies (1984, from 50c to 60c/gal)
d. Offered blanket pardon to eight million illegal aliens; 2.9 million took him up but all benefited.
e. Opened borders to cheap Asian goods (Taiwan, Japan then) at cost of millions of US jobs
4. Reduce inflation
a. Borrowed money to hide the inflationary effects of changing economy toward asset base
b. Changed character of US job base from industrial to retail (MLM type instead of production)
c. Changed statistical bases for recording official economic situation numbers
Summary on Reagan
Reagan delivered higher taxes to working class Americans, lower taxes on people and corporations exploiting American workers, and he did it with a smile, hitting every mark on his stage. In sum Reagan was a shallow thinking gladhanding corporate shill; Otis Chandler hired him to beat Pat Brown in California, then handed his boy off to Don Regan. Reagan's stage managers kept him center stage shadow boxing a bankrupt and tottering empire to the applause of halfwit America, while they worked behind the scenes with corrupt congresses to loot the federal treasury. By the time he left office WF Buckley and Barry Goldwater had come to regret ever supporting Reagan. All that kept them silent in public was their own complicity in electing someone that stupid and weak.
A footnote: Reagan's acting chops were not recognized in life; in real time he fooled that segment who could be fooled. That was then. An important measure of the worth of a person is whether they continue to buy the Legend of Ronald Reagan or not.
3. The USSR was bankrupt when Reagan was elected. They couldn't even afford hormone shots for the East German "women's" Olympic teams by 1980. The idea the USSR were going to nuke America was popular only among people seeking something to fear. That sort of trait has definitely been traced to genetic defect. If Reagan had focused on industry instead of making up war stories and playing with his plastic soldiers he might have amounted to something in real life instead of just inside the heads of delusional neocons.
Who's the dunce, here, babe? Someone stupid enough to believe Reagan turned the economy around, or someone that understands the horsepower of the greatest industrial nation ever to be sold out by a bobble headed idiot?
If you have enough emotional self control to read the facts on Reagan here they are:
1. Tripled the debt
2. Signed pay parity bills
3. Expanded the federal government in size and power while at the same time convincing morons he was doing the opposite
4. First finance sector bailouts (S&Ls, and it was during Reagan's presidency that the Fed started buying private sector paper for the purpose of propping up markets - all the while braying about the purity of markets).
5. Expanded direct corporate welfare beyond Nixon's "revenue sharing" horseshit to state and local governments, possibly the stupidest people ever to bumble into "other people's money".
6. Continued on purpose what the moron, LBJ, started by accident - returning the MIC to the biggest lobby buying congressscum
7. Lied about his military service (although by the time he praised Nazi war heroes at Bitzberg, he was getting senile).
What can possibly be more cliched than gaggles of halfwits following a charismatic to a bad place, then spending the rest of their lives in denial and publicly suppressing buyer's remorse by bragging about their love of the charismatic?
All in all, while bovine America basked in the evangelical skills of a man wrapped in the flag and surrounded by religious nuts, many rational Americans understood that corporations had finally got their man into the white house.
The only reason I paid any attention to the man was to see if a big time Democrat would blow him on camera. For those with the chops to run the numbers and connect cause-effect dots, it can't be missed that it was during the Reagan presidency that America lost its way. All it takes is integrity to admit it. Go ahead, try it. One imagines it won't be the worst morning after of your life.
Reagan was the embodiment of the 'welfare queen' he chided. Reagan was the most fiscally irresponsible president in our history. Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt.
Ironic you quote Murray Rothbard...
The Myths of Reaganomics
Mises Daily: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 by Murray N. Rothbard
I come to bury Reaganomics, not to praise it.
How well has Reaganomics achieved its own goals? Perhaps the best way of discovering those goals is to recall the heady days of Ronald Reagan's first campaign for the presidency, especially before his triumph at the Republican National Convention in 1980. In general terms, Reagan pledged to return, or advance, to a free market and to "get government off our backs."
Specifically, Reagan called for a massive cut in government spending, an even more drastic cut in taxation (particularly the income tax), a balanced budget by 1984 (that wild-spender, Jimmy Carter you see, had raised the budget deficit to $74 billion a year, and this had to be eliminated), and a return to the gold standard, where money is supplied by the market rather than by government. In addition to a call for free markets domestically, Reagan affirmed his deep commitment to freedom of international trade. Not only did the upper echelons of the administration sport Adam Smith ties, in honor of that moderate free-trader, but Reagan himself affirmed the depth of the influence upon him of the mid-19th century laissez-faire economist, Frederic Bastiat, whose devastating and satiric attacks on protectionism have been anthologized in economics readings ever since.
The gold standard was the easiest pledge to dispose of. President Reagan appointed an allegedly impartial gold commission to study the problem—a commission overwhelmingly packed with lifelong opponents of gold. The commission presented its predictable report, and gold was quickly interred.
Let's run down the other important areas:
Government Spending. How well did Reagan succeed in cutting government spending, surely a critical ingredient in any plan to reduce the role of government in everyone's life? In 1980, the last year of free-spending Jimmy Carter the federal government spent $591 billion. In 1986, the last recorded year of the Reagan administration, the federal government spent $990 billion, an increase of 68%. Whatever this is, it is emphatically not reducing government expenditures.
Sophisticated economists say that these absolute numbers are an unfair comparison, that we should compare federal spending in these two years as percentage of gross national product. But this strikes me as unfair in the opposite direction, because the greater the amount of inflation generated by the federal government, the higher will be the GNP. We might then be complimenting the government on a lower percentage of spending achieved by the government's generating inflation by creating more money. But even taking these percentages of GNP figures, we get federal spending as percent of GNP in 1980 as 21.6%, and after six years of Reagan, 24.3%. A better comparison would be percentage of federal spending to net private product, that is, production of the private sector. That percentage was 31.1% in 1980, and a shocking 34.3% in 1986. So even using percentages, the Reagan administration has brought us a substantial increase in government spending.
Also, the excuse cannot be used that Congress massively increased Reagan's budget proposals. On the contrary, there was never much difference between Reagan's and Congress's budgets, and despite propaganda to the contrary, Reagan never proposed a cut in the total budget.
Deficits. The next, and admittedly the most embarrassing, failure of Reaganomic goals is the deficit. Jimmy Carter habitually ran deficits of $40-50 billion and, by the end, up to $74 billion; but by 1984, when Reagan had promised to achieve a balanced budget, the deficit had settled down comfortably to about $200 billion, a level that seems to be permanent, despite desperate attempts to cook the figures in one-shot reductions.
This is by far the largest budget deficit in American history. It is true that the $50 billion deficits in World War II were a much higher percentage of the GNP; but the point is that that was a temporary, one-shot situation, the product of war finance. But the war was over in a few years; and the current federal deficits now seem to be a recent, but still permanent part of the American heritage.
One of the most curious, and least edifying, sights in the Reagan era was to see the Reaganites completely change their tune of a lifetime. At the very beginning of the Reagan administration, the conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, convinced that deficits would disappear immediately, received a terrific shock when they were asked by the Reagan administration to vote for the usual annual increase in the statutory debt limit. These Republicans, some literally with tears in their eyes, protested that never in their lives had they voted for an increase in the national debt limit, but they were doing it just this one time because they "trusted Ronald Reagan" to balance the budget from then on. The rest, alas, is history, and the conservative Republicans never saw fit to cry again. Instead, they found themselves adjusting rather easily to the new era of huge permanent deficits. The Gramm-Rudman law, allegedly designed to eradicate deficits in a few years, has now unsurprisingly bogged down in enduring confusion.
As for Reagan, conservatives view him as their only representative. However, as has been said, he enlarged government, and did not limit it. He increased the debt, and did not reduce it.
The Myths of Reaganomics - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily
Reagan was such a visionary
How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan
With the Gipper's reputation flagging after Clinton, neoconservatives launched a stealthy campaign to remake him as a "great" president.
www.salon.com
Last edited:
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