Both administrations had economic booms. Both had scandals. So which did a greater good for this country?
You misspelled, “One administration ran up unprecedented, crippling deficits, while the other did little to help those families being left behind in the economic expansion.” Hope this helps. 
So, your answer to the OP would be “none of the above”?
No cites, just my subjective impression as an absorber of the media output:
Reagan’s “boom” was borrowed from future administrations, and was paid off and then some by Clinton’s administration.
And as to scandals, Clinton rented out the Lincoln bedroom and was dishonest about his seedy personal life; Reagan sold illegal arms for US hostages and connived at a shadow government that manipulated foreign governments and trafficked in drugs.
They both strike me as equally dishonest and manipulative in their public persona, but Reagan’s hidden agenda seemed so much more sinister and dangerous than Clinton’s. Clinton’s hidden agenda seems very personal, about his place in history and his dick, and Reagan’s seemed to me to approach a caricature of fascism.
Clinton’s a stunted adolescent focused on his weenie; Reagan was a frustrated would-be dictator.
To me as a biased anti-Republican, it’s pretty cut and dried.
As a side note, I want to recommend the following books to anyyone interested in Reagan’s term of office:
On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency by Mark Hertsgaard. (This book is excellent.)
The Education of David Stockman by William Greider
The Triumph of Politics by David Stockman
Liberty Under Siege: American Politics 1976-1988 by Walter Karp
The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American 80’s by Paul Slansky (This book is hilarious.)
Reagan’s America by Garry Wills
Enjoy…and I mean that sincerely. If anyone who’s read any of these books want to discuss 'em, I’d love to do so.
What lissener said…
The russians were already losing the arms race when Reagan decided to outspend them.
But don’t forget calling in the psychics to the White house!
This shouldn’t really be necessary.
Reagan inherited a nation with soaring credit rates, galloping inflation, a weak military, and the other superpower of the world aiming nuclear missiles at us.
His party controlled one house of Congress for two years of his terms.
He reduced inflation back to negligible levels, cut the interest rate by more than half, started the longest peacetime boom in American history, reduced poverty (look it up), and defeated the Soviet Union, enabled the Afghanis to drive the Russians out of their country, and two rabidly partisan investigations of the only significant scandal of his administration both concluded that he was not involved in it. The economic boom he triggered continues to this day, with one brief and shallow recession that was timed such that our current President took office. Every budget he submitted to Congress would have decreased the deficit. His tax cuts were far more than self financing, and the Democratically controlled Congress is overwhelmingly responsible for breaking their promises to cut spending to eliminate the deficit. Remember the savings and loan scandal? It was caused by Democrat Jim Wright, at the behest of his political cronies, to allow them to continue to loot the public treasury.
Clinton inherited a large deficit. His first official act was to try to increase it. His party controlled both houses of Congress for six years of his terms, and every budget Clinton submitted or projected added a minimum of $200 billion to the deficit. Three years after the Republicans took control of Congress, the deficit is gone. Clinton fought tooth and nail against welfare reform, and then took credit for it after it was forced down his throat.
Clinton lied. He lied repeatedly, provably, about large matters and small. He attacked and sexually harassed women. He lied under oath. He became the second President in history to be impeached for this offense. He bombed Iraq in an attempt to prevent his impeachment. He ruined the life of the director of the White House travel office in order to give the job to one of his political hacks. He employed private investigators to harass his political enemies, and the women he discarded to prevent them from speaking publicly.
Clinton is a sociopath with a genius for political maneuvering. Reagan is a statesman with a genius for communication.
Clinton was and is handled with kid gloves by a media biased towards liberals, and comes out of it stinking of scandal. Reagan was hated with a depth and passion unmatched since Nixon by the media, and succeeded in what he aimed at regardless.
Clinton vs. Reagan? Please. That’s like comparing Harding with Roosevelt.
I’m not even going to get into the rest of your post–read the books I’ve referenced–but this sentence is, I’m pretty sure, demonstrably untrue.
Okay, I’ll get into one more bit.
This sentence is, I’m positive, demonstrably untrue. Can you say 1994? I knew you could.
Dammit, I can’t resist.
This sentence is so far from being true that it’s quite amusing. On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. Mark Hertsgaard. Should be at your local library.
No, you look it up. He reduced poverty by changing the definition: He lowered the official poverty rate, and suddenly there were fewer people under the new, lower income. Voila! reduced poverty.
Laughing too hard to read deal with the rest of your post–“defeated the Soviet Union”! Bwaaah! “rabidly partisan . . . only significant scandal”! Stop, please, I can’t breathe!
Something which, by the way, the Clinton administration has basically done with regard to unemployment. (See this thread for a bit of explication.) And, come to think of it, something all politicians have been doing lately with regard to welfare–“We’ve cut the welfare rolls by thirty percent!” “Yeah, but what’s happened to the people who are no longer receiving welfare? In the absence of systematic job training and placement, isn’t it disingenuous to gleefully correlate a cut in welfare recipients with a decline in poverty?” “Uh…we’ve cut welfare rolls by thirty percent!”
Yeah, Shodan, most of your post was verging on self-parody. It’s hard to take seriously. (Lemme see if I’ve got this straight…let’s see, Lawrence Walsh was “rabidly partisan” but Ken Starr is the paragon of objectivity. Hmm.)
Another book for Shodan to read: Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Coverup by Mr. Walsh. I found it rather unbiased, personally - I can’t imagine that the actual investigation was all that partisan (I am not old enough to remember much about it, except for wishing Oliver North would get off the TV). I was left with an impression that Reagan wasn’t really a bad guy, but that he was basically incompetent and rarely interefered with his cabinet’s running of the country. I don’t know which is worse: the idea that he was involved with illegal dealings or that he had so little idea of what his subordinates were doing and that they felt no obligation to tell him. Neither reflects well on Reagan as an honorable leader.
I will not get into the debate on who is better, Reagan or Clinton. Since I was five years old when Reagan began his presidency and wasn’t particularly interested in politics during his term, I don’t feel qualified to comment on that subject. Plus, I’m completely biased. (I’m not a gigantic Clinton fan or anything, but I’d probably vote for a donkey before I’d vote for a Republican. :))
I find it amazing that people’s biases are so strong that you can’t look objectively at the last 20 years and come to completely opposite conclusions. We have some people claiming Clinton was a genius and Reagan was a dangerous, stupid fool, and other’s claiming that Reagan was a brilliant communicator and a great statesman, and Clinton was a fratboy who couldn’t see past the end of his dick.
The truth, as always, is somewhere in between those extremes. Part of the truth which is usually neglected in these debates is that a President actually has a fairly small amount of control over the actual economy. If the economy happens to do well, the President gets the credit if you like him. If it tanks, he gets the blame if you hate him.
I lean towards thinking that Reagan was a great president. The main reason: the state of the country when he became President vs the state of the country when he left. At the start of 1980, the U.S. was a mess. Inflation and interest rates were 21% and 17% respectively, if I recall. The country was in ‘malaise’, the Soviets and their client states were on the march all over the world, and the U.S. military was a mess.
Reagan started off with a recession not of his making - Carter (wisely) appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Fed, and he started the modern fiscal policy carried on by Greenspan which forced inflation and interest rates down. This was guaranteed to cause a recession, and it was also guaranteed to cause big deficits for Reagan, both because of lower revenue from the recession and because of the loss of ‘bracket creep’ taxes.
In case you’re not familiar, ‘bracket creep’ occurs when you have A) a highly indexed tax rate, and B) inflation. People find that their incomes keep going up, forcing them into ever-higher tax brackets, while their real purchasing power doesn’t change. The net effect is a built in annual tax increase that existed for most of the 70’s but vanished almost overnight under Reagan, through no fault of his own.
I have “The Triumph of Politics” by Stockman, and it’s a great book that illustrates how hard it really is to cut government spending. What comes across in that book is not that Reagan was a hard-line ideologue willing to sacrifice the people, but that he was, deep down, too soft and nice to implement his own rhetoric. He’d make a great speech about cutting the budget, but when Stockman would actually show him a proposed cut Reagan would say, “But we can’t do THAT… Can’t we find somewhere else to cut?”
In the end, government spending went UP under Reagan.
Anyway, he inherited a mess, and when he left the U.S. had pride again, the Soviet Union was broken, interest rates and inflation were low, the economy was booming, and overall things were pretty good.
Clinton started his term in the middle of an economic boom, and essentially did nothing. In my book, that’s a good thing. As a believer in the free market, I WANT politicians who do nothing. He largely kept his hands off the economy, which was a good thing and I’ll give him credit for it.
HOWEVER, the Clinton of the last six years is VERY different than the Clinton of the first two. When he first entered the White House, he was firing out proposals right and left that would have done irreparable harm. Remember Hillary’s gigantic health care proposal? Thousands of pages of regulations and controls over a major part of the economy. It was a mess. Clinton used up most of his political capital trying to ram that through, and lost. After that, he seemed content to simply go along for the ride.
And that’s a good thing.
And there are just as many books out there that would show that it’s true. Sam Stone called it right - the real truth is somewhere in the middle and I agree with most everything he posted there.
But here are some facts about the 80’s that are proof that it was not the decade of greed where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Sure the rich got richer, but so did everyone, the poor at a faster rate. The poorest Americans increased their income at a slightly higher rate than the richest - 17% to 12%, while under Carter, only the top 1% of Americans increased their real income at all as an average (160% higher increase under Carter than Reagan). Families earning $50K went from under 25% to over 31% of wage earners. Of those in the bottom tax bracket in '80, 65% jumped at least 2 tax brackets over the 80’s. Those under the poverty level dropped by 3.8 million - many getting the 20 million real jobs that were created - not the part-time, minimum wage types that make up a high percentage of Clinton/Gore’s numbers of new jobs. Reagan’s tax cuts did a far greater service to the poor than the rich, despite what you hear. The poorest 20% had their taxes drop 540% while the top 20% had their’s drop only 9.3%. The richest 1% which paid 25% of all income tax in '90 had their’s only drop 7.9%. A tax cut only for the rich, my ass.
Remember too, that the opposite party controlled both houses of congress for most, if not all of his two terms. They are the ones who approved the high spending budgets that tripled our debt and sent them through to Reagan to sign. Much of the money spent was on rampant and unnecessary pork-barrel projects. Yet Reagan, and not Congress, gets the complete blame for the deficit rise. At the same time, the opposite party of Clinton controlled congress for 6 of his 8 years, the budget gets balanced, there are (grossly over-)projected surpluses, welfare reform has drastically reduced the welfare roles and put people to work, yet Clinton and not the Congress seems to get the credit.
The thing that makes Reagan a great president, isn’t as much that he brought us out of the severe recession of the Carter years and ushered in the greatest peace-time economic boom in the history of the nation, or even that he presided over the fall of most of Communism. Its that he brought pride back to America. His undying positive outlook rubbed off on the rest of the nation and that was exactly what this nation needed at the time.
What has Clinton brought us? The attempt to take over a huge block of private industry, then after he failed at that, very little else except what he was forced to so by the Republican Congress; the use of the military as a social experiment and to fight battles that not only were not in our national interest, but many times were to take the focus off of his scandals; the fall of morale not only in the military, but nation-wide. I mean, we can’t trust a word the top man in office says.
Our we really better off than 8 years ago? I don’t think so. We have higher salaries and more material things, but our savings accounts are empty, our credit cards are maxed and charitable giving is down. And this doesn’t even mention the downward spiral of morality and increase in drug use and risky lifestyles - especially among teens and young adults - after years of decrease. That’s not being better off if you ask me.
In the end, Reagan will be shown to be a very good president if not a great one, and Clinton will be shown to be a fair one that will be known much more for his scandals and mistrust by the people, than any accomplishments or the economy.
Rather than get into a war of my numbers versus your numbers, MKM, let me simply state that I served in the armed forces duringn the Reagan years, and my memories are not entirely in line with the picture you paint. Then again, hearing you decry the immorality of the last 8 years in comparison to the Reagan years makes me suspect that we experienced a very different decade in the 80’s.
Yeah, I’m sure we did lead different lives in the 80’s, Spiritus. I was living my teen years growing up on one of those Americam family farms that had to struggle to stay afloat - working like dogs to keep it going. And yet, after the sudden death of my grandfather see it collapse anyway.
Still, I see the facts of the big picture as one of great positives for the nation as a whole.
What good is an edit button if you can’t use it? Make that living my late teens and early 20’s through the 80’s.
Yeah, Reagan brought us out the recession…HOWEVER…
His overspending resulted in a second one, during the Bush administration. NOT all of of it was Bush’s fault. (Some, but not all).
See this is the problem. Reagan must hold some of the responsibilty of the budget deficitsn, no doubt about it. He asked for and got money to rebuild the military. He ultimately signed off on the budgets. But the Democratic-led congress are the ones who put those budgets together with billions upon billions of unnecessary pork-barrel spending. IIRC, it was that they said something like, well, we’ll give you your military spending, but we want all this other spending. Give us what we want and you get what you want. Either side could have held the other’s spending in check, much like during the past 8 years. The republican Congress held Clinton in check, and did the same by refusing to sign their budgets one year, shutting down the government and falsely turning the blame on Congressional Republicans.
The point is, the Democratic-controlled congress matched Reagan’s spending with their own. They deserve as much of the blame as Reagan does.