It is economic policy & conditions which allowed people such as Gates and Jobs to do what they did. Im sure as Republican Reagan would have been the first to admit that. It really is being disingenuous to take Reagan’s economic/jobs record away from him.
It’s also a bit disingenuous to cite just one exceptional month of job growth. As near as I can tell, that was September of '83, with 1,115,000 new jobs. The month before, the economy lost 308,000 jobs, and in October the gain was back down to 271,000, and it never hit even half of that 1.1 million again during Reagan’s time in office.
Numbers from here.
The job growth numbers in August / September 1983 were the result of a strike at AT&T, where ~700,000 workers went off the rolls in August (thus the drop you note) and back on again in September (and thus the 1,000,000+ gain). It appears something similar happened in July/August 1956, but I can’t find out what the reason was there.
Carter had better job numbers than Reagan. During his four-year term there was an average annual increase of 3.06%. The best Reagan managed was during his second term when the average annual increase was 2.69%. His first term was much worse. Cite.
If you look at the numbers, Reagan wasn’t particularly good for the economy.
I only called up the month-by-month numbers, thought they looked kinda hinky. Workers on strike in one month, and coming back in the next would explain it.
And your link, while explaining how the lie got disseminated, contains this (attributed to John Nolte):
So that would be 1.1 billion jobs, 4 times the population of the country. Mr. Nolte’s innumeracy is no fluke.
Well, it could not have been because of any actual tactics used by or attributed to the ANC, or else the Reagan Admin would have given the same “terrorist” designation to the Contras in Nicaragua – so what does that leave?
All it took was having an entrenched regime claim the rebels were Communists, and we’d pour the weapons and money right in there. The apartheid types in SA did it regarding the ANC, the banana-plantation regime in Nicaragua did it to the Contras, plenty of examples. But that’s how we fought the Cold War, it wasn’t just Reagan trapped inside that house of mirrors.
When Mandela died in 2013, Noah Millman wrote in The American Conservative:
That doesn’t really mean much , Obama and Clinton won a second time too!
People vote for someone b/c they like them and RR was an actor and knew how
to act ‘likeable’ . I remember hearing about how people liked RR more than anything he did as a president . And what with people driving around with a sticker on their car saying “What would Reagan do?” Who give a shit the guy is dead!
His likeability – and there’s no denying it, even by a harsh critic like me; he had enormous appeal to the vast number of unsophisticated, low information voter that currently makes up a big proportion of our most senior voters – obscured a lot of bad policy. His first biographer who wasn’t alive during his administration will not be inclined to be kind just because he remembered Reagan’s personal charm.
I also find it amusing that GOP candidates continue to raise the ghost of the Great Communicator when something like 60 million eligible voters are unlikely to be swayed in the least by his memory. To them, he is the old guy who told corny jokes and had a haircut like their grandfathers.
purplehearingaid and Red Wiggler? I fear this thread may become marooned.
Oh, don’t wine!
Again, I believe posters are doing Reagan a disservice. Reagan was able to create jobs whilst at the same time reducing inflation. That was something Carter was distinctly unable to do.
Reagan will always have a complicated legacy. America had its confidence restored during the Reagan years. It had become fashionable for liberal to say that America’s time in the sun had passed, that the next generation was going to just have to settle for having it worse than previous generations, and oh, it’s so complicated and we’re so smart and we can’t figure it out so those simplistic conservatives with their simplistic solutions should just shut up.
History sure seems like it’s repeating now.
But Reagan also failed in many important ways. High deficits, no one really in charge in his administration, poverty went up, and despite hard rhetoric, terrorists got the idea that they could get what they wanted from us.
Much of Carter’s success with employment came from paying people to do nothing through CETA (the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act).
I got to hear about how this program worked first hand because my wife was employed by a major metropolitan city. Several CETA workers came to work in her department. These people came from disadvantaged social, economic and educational backgrounds. They were also federal employees and as such the city’s position was that they could neither be disciplined nor fired. The result of this was that they sat around all through their shifts just shooting the shit with each other or reading paperback novels and not doing a whit of the work they were being paid to perform. Occasionally a new CETA worker would come in and actually try to learn and perform the job, only to be called aside and told in no certain terms that that wasn’t the way things worked around there. These people literally did nothing at all but show up. The city’s workers did 100% of the work that had to be done, which they were already doing anyway as the the CETA workers were entirely extraneous and unneeded to begin with. (And oh, yeah…just as an extra added annoyance, the CETA workers were getting paid more than the city employees who were doing all the actual work.)
So basically Carter brought unemployment numbers down by paying tons of people to show up and draw federal salaries and benefits for not doing a damn thing. It’s for reasons like these that so many conservatives loathe government programs as a solution to economic and social ills.
Carter managed to worse our relations with everyone, enemies and allies alike, as well as worsen relations between the executive branch and the legislative branch(even though it was controlled by his own party), as well as worsen the relationship between the people and their government through a long series of blunders.
But Jimmy Carter was smarter., while Reagan was a senile old dolt. How could this possibly have happened? How did our relations with everyone get better under Reagan and the US’ prestige rise so much?
On the downside, Republican voters learned the wrong lesson from this: that intelligence and policy details don’t matter. Reagan was able to overcome his limitations because he was open minded, always willing to compromise, treated everyone with respect, and had a relentlessly optimistic view of the world and was good at explaining that view to the public. If you’re not that bright, don’t care about details, are an asshole, and think you already know all you need to know, then you are GWB.
After your 1.1 million jobs claim I think I’ll let you do your own research this time.
Cite?
Which part do you need a cite for? That inflation was lower under Reagan than Carter? That’s kinda one of the most important aspects of Reagan’s Presidency, that inflation was finally defeated by the Volcker Fed.
All of it. That’s how it works around here, right; you make a claim and you’re expected to back it up. Doubly true for a poster whose previous claim got shot down and who then moves on to something else like it never happened.
You still need to define what you need a cite for. That inflation was lower? That’s the only citable claim I see in his statement and that should be something we all already know to participate in this discussion.