Ronald Reagan: Hero? or Villain?

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Well... Ron was suffering from Alzheimer's, you know.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

It started to unravel from just after WWII. It wasn't noticed back then, because back then the US had a large surplus. I call the time that the surplus was reducing to 0, a deterioration. It seams to me logical to call it that way.

1960s debt % to GDP was still declining. Whatever you feel that LBJ did, he had the taxes and growth to pay for it. Things go off the rails starting with Reagan, who decided that government should be a free service but neglected to stop paying people. Perot ran in 1992 almost entirely on the Reagan-Bush debt.

As for Carter or Reagan being worse. It's Bush and Nixon who left with the lowest approvals in modern times. Carter did not leave a mess like the 2008 financial crisis, was not racking up huge debts, and was not wiretapping the RNC or employing former spooks to do worse than that.

But the surplus too declined. The problem dates back a long time.

Ideally the government is supposed to run a zero surplus. In theory over a fairly short interval government income and government outlay should even out. Also the government should not be expanding the money supply which causes price inflation. But that is theory. In fact, the U.S. government has been running amuck since the time of LBJ. It took 15 years or thereabouts to set out on path leading to destruction.

If the government does run a surplus it is supposed to give the money back to its rightful owners or lower the rate of taxation until income and outlay balance.

ruveyn

And, remember Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg Cemetary, to lay a wreath at the graves of dead Nazis?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitburg

The scumbag actually equated SS troops to concentration camp victims!

Amazing what you can do with Photoshop....

I was talking about the entire US against the world. Commercial/payments surplus. They didn't reduce them, telling them that 0 balance is beater. It happened for structural issues. Something pathological started to happen from back then.

In order to see if you get beater, what really counts its your starting point, not your absolute position. I think its an acceptable definition. The Chernobyl accident, improved the environment.... because the humans flead the area. See, that's an environmental improvement. You started deeply in the red (humans destroying the environment), to just some radioactive pollution (beater then the humans ).

Kind of a stretch isn't it?
There was a lot more to the SS than just the camps.
Even I can do a better job of +r011ing than that......

There are two things for which I hold Reagan responsible:

1) Profoundly stupid economic policy which created an enormous fiscal deficit, funded by foreign purchases of US dollars. He grabbed a short term political gain from lower taxes and paved the way for the country to be mortgaged to the Japanese, the Germans and eventually the Chinese. If the rot had remained confined to the United States, so be it. But he dragged us along with them with the Free Trade Agreement.

2) He proverbially fiddled while Rome burned, doing nothing--actively and deliberately doing nothing--in the face of the emerging AIDS epidemic. We have a lost generation in the gay community, and I lay the reponsibility for that at his feet.

But to his credit, he did leave the United States with a more efficient economy, and he practiced a "big tent" style of politics, for which many of us might be wistful.

You're clearly the master.

NAFTA is one of the few things for which I give him credit.

NAFTA was negotiated under Bush, and ratified under Clinton.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to the FTA and to NAFTA per se. But I am concerned that a Free Trade environment is an erosion of Canadian sovereignty because of the disproportionate weight of American commercial interests.

But the death camps were by far the SS's greatest legacy.
Incidentally, as the SS "men" interned at Bitburg were only teens, I'll give Reagan this one, and concede that the two kids had been the victims of an evil ideology that had brainwashed them.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Even so, there were never victims "just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps."

A number of them probably relished the idea of killing Jews and other targets of Nazi persecution, and viewed themselves as heroic and patriotic. Probably very few concentration camp inmates relished their victimization.