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You do realize Carter inherited a bad economy himself, right? Things weren't going to turn around overnight. The American economy, since the founding of this nation, have always gone in cycles of good and bad. The strongest run of the economy, in terms of workers' wages staying on track with production, was strongest from WW2 up to when Reagan took office. So much revisionism by the rightwingers who made it their goal decades ago to turn Reagan into the Republican equivalent of FDR (in terms of impact). Truth is that virtually everything poisonous about the American economy today started on Reagan's watch. Reagan got Americans looking for shallow, quick, short term gains without worrying about long term consequences. He got the whole ball of wax rolling in terms of rising debt something that Clinton temporarily fixed before GW came in and blew things up all over again. The inequality issue regarding wages started under Reagan, with the 1% starting to take in larger percentages of the wealth with everyone else settling for less. It was Reagan's thirst for deregulation that initiated the rise of the Too Big To Fail banks that have really become a thorn in our sides for the past 15 years. There isn't one single thing that Reagan initiated during his time in office that led to any longterm growth and perpetual health of the American economy. It was Reagan's attack on the blue collar unions that lead to their demise and the decrease of leverage of the American worker. Since then the right wing have led this effort to convince the public that the most important thing is for the so-called job creators to not be burdened by rules and agreements and concerns for workers' rights;. People actually believe in this whole trickle down nonsense even though the last decade or so has shown us that when the 1% make more, they don't share by increasing the wages of their workers in proportion to inflation rates. Instead they merely hold on to that extra wealth, they hoard it. Admittedly unions have never been perfect and they have also shown to be susceptible to corruption. But what isn’t who isn't, susceptible to corruption in America? Politicians? Business men? Religious leaders? Activists? Those economists who put politics aside and study when the American economy and the middle class started to take a turn for the worse after the creation of the greatest middle class the world have ever seen, they tend to point to the early 1980s. And just who was in the Oval Office during that time?

And stop that nonsense about Reagan being some guy who showed strength internationally. During his run our embassies and our military bases got bombed again and again in the Middle East and Reagan’s response was to hightail it out of the countries we were attacked in I’m not even suggesting that was the wrong decision, but it certainly wasn’t a show of strength by doing so. He of course would flex his muscles by using bs reasons to invade POWERFUL nations like Grenada and lie to Congress and the public when explaining his administration's actions. It is in fact under Reagan that the executive branch began to increase this trend of using the military to invade/attack other nations without getting Congressional approval first. This type of thinking has infested the executive branch ever since.


Of course ending the cold war is what Reagan gets credit for, his most prestigious achievement if you listen to the inside the beltway folks. That’s fine and all but the more greater truth is that the USA was winning the cold war even before Reagan took office. Reagan sped up the process by dumping an insane amount of extra money from the country’s budget into the military spending forcing the Russians to try to match thereby helping send the Russian economy into a tailspin. Nonetheless if Gorbachev hadn’t come along Reagan’s actions could have led to a disastrous war because the nuclear clock had been move closer and closer to a dangerous point as a result of America’s aggression. If anyone else besides Gorbachev was running Russia during Reagan’s second term all that saber rattling may have had truly dire consequences. But hey Reagan’s gamble paid off. Still it led to decisions that would have terrible consequences down the road such as helping train and financially back the Taliban which led to the rise of Bin Laden and Al Queda.


The reality is that all Presidents make their share of mistakes. Not one President can escape from history’s long view of negative consequences caused by them. Reagan is no different and yet his supporters demand he walked on water. They are zealots who came up with plans to use federal dollars to ensure that each county in America had one building named after their idol Ronny Reagan. And they the want to quiet any discourse on some of the not so rosy decisions that came from his administration such as his inhumane response to gays during the AIDS crisis and his coddling the apartheid regime in South Africa. And to get back to the poster who originally brought up Reagan’s name yes Reagan oversaw a culture switch in America in which government started to, for better or for worse, mandate our morality. Reagan’s rise coincided with the birth of that of the Religious Right who helped vote him into power in the first place. And while Reagan may not have agreed with all of the views of the Religious Right, he stood by silently or at times assisted as that fringe of Americans strived to push back on women’s right to abortion, increase the censorship of our entertainment, break down the Founding Fathers' imposed barriers between religion and government, push the government to tell people what was allowed in their bedrooms etc. Essentially it was a right-wing version of a nanny state, but this one tried to dictate your morality rather than your diet.

Please, Reagan sucked ass.

I'm happiest...in the saddle.