No! Wait! Suddenly I see the light! The Reagan, of course! Broke the back of the Soviet Union! Author of this Shining Citadel on the Hill!
How best to honor such a splendid career, so much the epitome of everything American. Let’s release the Reagan Papers! You know, those reams and reams of notes, documents, transcripts that were supposed to be released a while back? For reasons only GeeDubya truly understands, they are still held from public scrutiny.
But now? Now, surely is the time! Let historians and lawyers pore over the documents, transcripts, etc. so that we, the American public, can truly come to know the depth, and the details, of such spectacular feats of statesmanship as have been mentioned here.
Surely it is only blushing modesty that moves the Republicans to keep such things from prying eyes. Yes, that must be it.
I would presume every president left a body of “papers” – which have and have not been released? Is there an unreleased file of Carter Papers, Ford Papers, etc.? Does some law govern how much time must elapse before the appers are made public? Or is it purely at the discretion of the present administration?
Of course the Soviets peaked in the 70s. But by the early 80s, their gains were wiped out, in some cases overnight, most especially when oil prices failed to stay high enough to support the amount of money they’d thrown into new production.
Now, do you happen to know what Team B is, who was on it, and what they did? In fact, there are a lot of errie parrallels to what Team B did back then and who they were and what’s happened more recently with things like OSP.
It’s always amusing when people lie the first time around, and when the lies are corrected, it’s derided as revisionism.
The “tear down this wall” soundbite was in 1987, Sam. You would more honestly trace the uprisings in Eastern Europe to Solidarnosc and the Gdansk shipyard strike in Poland - in 1980. The spiritual encouragement for that is traceable to the College of Cardinals’ choice of a young Pope from Poland, and the political activism he engaged in there in the form of religion. All it takes for a repressive regime to be overthrown is for the people to stop being afraid, and over the next several years it became clear that the regimes lacked the power to prevent it.
But all that stuff wasn’t on TV in North America, with all those funny-looking people with their funny languages with all those accent marks, so there just weren’t any good sound bites for us until that veteran camera-hog dropped by and gave one. It fooled a number of people into thinking he had something tangible to do with it - but what would have been different if he hadn’t? Leadership my ass.
The rest of his legacy, bearing in mind that he had a lot of help?
Tripling the national debt - while submitting budgets further out of balance every year, claiming he needed a balanced-budget amendment. That’s like a serial killer sending the police a note saying “Stop me before I kill again! If I do, it’s your fault!”
Getting 200 Marines killed in Beirut for no good reason - why were they there? Nobody ever really knew.
Wagging the dog by launching the invasion of Grenada just 48 hours later, and “rescuing” all those medical students who hadn’t thought they were in any danger. Oh, and we wound up paying to build that airport, not the USSR. Thanks.
Continuing a shameful Cold War policy of arming any damn local with a snazzy uniform as long as he’d say he was “anti-communist”. Sure didn’t fool the ripped-off, oppressed locals anywhere into thinking America was their friend, did that? That’s Guin’s area, so I’ll leave it to her, except to note that too many other Administrations are just as guilty.
Allowing the Iran-Contra treason to take place. Gang, it isn’t about the Contras, or the hostages, it’s about supplying arms to a country that was at war with us. The Constitution goes so far as to prescribe the death penalty for it.
A fiscal policy that simply resulted in a serious wealth transfer from the middle and lower classes right to the rich, hobbling our economic growth as much as the debt service he added.
The stripping of environmental protections under Watt and Gorsuch at the EPA.
The massive venal corruption of his administration, on a scale not seen since Harding. Over a hundred convictions of his staff members resulted. (Clinton zero, while we’re counting, and the clock is still ticking for GWB).
And, lastly, being around to watch as a rotten tree fell down in a gust of wind.
Dio, you’re not alone, I voted for him in 1980 in the belief that he actually meant what he said about balancing the budget. Didn’t take long, just a few months IIRC, to realize he was a liar, although the peculiar kind that believes whatever is on the script he’s handed. That’s all he essentially was - a scriptreader. He was even lazier than the current officeholder, and even more easily manipulated by ideologues. Damn Mondale for not making his case more forcefully, and Dukakis for not really wanting the job.
So, how does the process work if, as in this case, the “former president” cannot give his consent because he is dead?
Well, strictly speaking, the U.S. and Iran have never been at war. On the other hand, the Constitution defines treason as “giving aid and comfort to [the United States’] enemies,” and “enemies” could be defined more broadly than actively belligerent powers. On the third hand, the Constitution does not prescribe the death penalty for treason. Article III, Section 3:
Fair enough, the intelligence agencies were complete failures. And certainly nobody was smart enough to put two and two together and realize that upon invasion of Afghanistan that the USSR was traveling down a road pocked with other nations that had gone tits up after invading and colonizing other nations. After all, France, Great Britain and Belgium were virtually unknown.
All according to information coming from those failed intelligence agencies, right? The USSR was dying throughout the eighties. Hell, Afghanistan was a naked land grab. And for a country so strong, mighty and virile, they were still jonesin’ pretty hard for a port on the Med.
Still looking for a cite, but I do clearly recall the mullahs issuing a decree to that effect, perhaps as a technique to solidify their own control by declaring an external enemy (like that’s never been done before, huh?). Maybe *we * haven’t been at war with *them *, if that hair is splittable.
Okay, that was sloppy of me. It does say that Congress shall prescribe the penalty, and, unsurprisingly, it has done so:
But apparently it’s enough to wear a dress uniform with a lot of ribbons on it to your hearing on TV, and you’ll not only not be charged, you’ll be declared a hero and even get your own talk show.
But you have to admit that Reagan has done the right thing at long last. He has spared his family further trouble and temporarily knocked the endless babble about a 60 year old war off the TV.
One of his legacies has been that Republicans are now willing to saddle future generations with current problems by a large increase in the debt. Hip, hip, hooray for The Gipper!
In fact that name is perfect for Reagan. It is from a movie in which he acted out the part of someone who knew what he was doing.
After '97, we were in surplus through the end of the Clinton Administration. So, the deficit was not really dropping rapidly at the end of Reagan’s term. A rapid drop occurred between 1986 and 1987 and then it pretty much flattened out, dropping only slowly through 1989 and then rising back up once Bush I got into office. By '92, it was back up pretty close to the highest levels of the Reagan era with the exception of the 1983 number from the depths of the recession.
An interesting question is why the big drop in the deficit that occurred between 1986 and 1987. Part of it is that in real terms spending dropped a bit (1.3%) but the bigger news was the revenues increased in real terms by 8.1%, much faster than the 2.3% and 3.2% increases of the previous and following year. My guess from the jumpiness of this is that it reflects in large part a tax increase…and indeed there were plenty of tax increases through the later part of the Reagan Administration although it is hard to find out the relative magnitudes of them. In fact, individual income tax receipts rose 12.5% and corporate tax receipts rose a whopping 32.9% in those years (not in real terms) while social security receipts rose 6.8%. [In dollar amounts, the numbers were $44 billion, $20 billion, and $19 billion for individual income tax, corporate income tax, and s.s., respectively.] So, my hypothesis is that one would find that the tax hike was primarily in individual and corporate income taxes.
In my case, which is anecdotal, that’s true. The Reagan tax cut eliminated the automatic deduction for health insurance cost, the deduction for state sales taxes and taxed 75% of our Social Security. My personal tax went up slightly.
Ditto for my California state income tax when Reagan became Governor.
To be fair predictions of Soviet collapse long predated the Reagan years. Consider “Will the Soviet Union survive til 1984?” which was first published in 1970, and highlighted the rot that was evident even then.
While noone is going to claim that the economy was great when Reagan came in (due to high inflation and interest rates, a recession, etc.), your story is a bit biased by capturing just a small snapshot in time, looking more at economic cycles than anything else. For one thing, the deficit under Carter had declined from a high-water mark of 4.2% of GDP in 1976 under Ford to 1.6% of GDP in 1979, before rising to 2.7% and 2.6% in 1980 and 1981 under the energy crisis and faltering economy. But, this is to be compared to values that went up to as high as 6% under Reagan and hovered at around 5% through 1986. Even the low-water mark of 2.9% in 1989, near the peak of the economic cycle, was higher than the highest percentage under Carter…and that value of 2.9% quickly shot up again once the economy started slowing down.
For a second thing, yes, real GDP growth went negative in 1980 (down 1.4%), it had been quite healthy at 5.1%, 5.4%, and 4.0% in the years 1977-1979. In fact, these rates compare favorably to the current 4.4% annualized rate for GDP growth in the first quarter of this year, numbers that you have used to argue how freakin’ wonderful the economy is at the moment in several other thread.
I worked for DOD during the Reagan years and it always puzzled my how he could simultaneously claim that the Soviet Union was operating under a bankrupt system doomed to failure, but it took all of our efforts and a huge DOD to keep them in check.
I guess he wasn’t such a bad actor after all. Its the “sincerity thing” that actors can feign, I guess.
Were you agreeing with me? Because your numbers do. I said the deficit was falling rapidly at the end of his second term as the U.S. grew out of its debt problem. Your cite shows exactly that. Why did you need to take exception with my statement? You even admitted that high growth during that time was at least partly ressponsible. Did I miss the rebuttal?
Any economic measure of the comparative performance of Reagan vs his predecessors would be incomplete without considering the drastic effects of Paul Volcker’s tight money policy. It’s no surprise that contracting the money supply to crush inflation would put the country in recession. Volcker deserves lots of credit for whipping inflation, as does Carter for appointing him. A loose money policy is a form of deficit, after all. We could have more growth next year if the fed unleashed the gates of the money supply - but it would be an illusion.