I voted against Reagan twice. I never liked the guy. My dislike was visceral. It was too easy for me to imagine him in one of his grade B movies, playing the role of a cavalry officer flashing his awe shucks grin after massacring an Indian village.
Nevertheless, he did not seem to generate the hatred on the left that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama generated on the right.
During the Reagan years liberals were demoralized. We knew that the Great Society had been a failure, that the civil rights legislation had been a disappointment, but we were unwilling to do much thinking about why they had failed.
However, this thread is about Reagan's economic polices. The good economic numbers that happened during his administration were due exclusively to stimulating the economy with borrowed money. The U.S. economy was like an athlete who trained using amphetamines and steroids. The rich got, and stayed, richer. The rest of the country did not benefit.
More jobs were created per year under Carter than Reagan. The Carter recession of 1980 was much milder than the Reagan recession of 1982. Unemployment never got as high under Carter as it got under Reagan. Of course, Reagan's deficits were vastly higher than Carter's deficits. The inflation of 1979 - 1980, which declined after 1982 was due to fluctuations in the world price of petroleum over which neither president had much control over.
The enduring legacy of Reagan is to leave most Republicans with the delusion that tax cuts generate more tax revenue than tax increases.
Carter was thrown out in 1980 (his bid for a second term). Reagan won his with 49 states. But that means nothing (except that he apparently duped a lot of democrats too).
Reagan took over a disaster that was much worse than what Obama faced given the inflation rates of the times. Most of Reagan's early job losses were due to the contracting economy (thank you Jimmy).
Reagan's deficits mean nothing.
Had Bush not been such a fool, the trajectory Clinton put us on would have retired all debt (Thank you Ronnie). So Reagan's borrowing was meaningless.
Bush's borrowing was simply stupid.
Why did, "Reagan's deficits mean nothing?" They were not supposed to happen. According to Reagan's Voodoo Economists tax cuts would balance the budget by 1983.
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One of the leading national issues during that year was the
release of 52 Americans being held hostage in Iran since 4 November 1979.
[1] Reagan won the election. On the day of his inauguration, in fact, 20 minutes after he concluded his inaugural address, the
Islamic Republic of Iran announced the release of the hostages. The timing gave rise to an allegation that representatives of Reagan's presidential
campaign had conspired with Iran to delay the release until after the election to thwart President Carter from pulling off an "
October surprise".
According to the allegation, the Reagan Administration rewarded Iran for its participation in the plot by supplying Iran with weapons via Israel and by unblocking Iranian government monetary assets in U.S. banks.
After twelve years of mixed media attention, both houses of the U.S. Congress held separate inquiries and concluded that the allegations lacked supporting documentation.
Nevertheless, several individuals—most notably former Iranian President
Abulhassan Banisadr,
[2] former Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir, former
Naval intelligence officer and
National Security Council member
Gary Sick; and former Reagan/Bush campaign and White House staffer Barbara Honegger—have stood by the allegation. There have been allegations that the
1980 Camarate air crash which killed the Portuguese Prime Minister,
Francisco de Sá Carneiro, was in fact an assassination of the Defence Minister,
Adelino Amaro da Costa, who had said that he had documents concerning the October surprise conspiracy theory and was planning on taking them to the
United Nations General Assembly.
October Surprise conspiracy theory - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia