No. You have to have lived it. Anyone who lived in the early 80's experienced first-hand how effed-up the country was under Reagan. Other than the 59% of the people that voted for him, I mean. But OTHER than to those people, and the people who are too young now to remember, and the people who disagree, it's clear that Reagan hosed the country in his first term. Clearly. Ed O.
Denny says the country was effed-up in the early Reagan years, and you say it wasn't. The difference between then and now is that this country is going to die soon if something doesn't change. This was not the case then. Reagan inherited a tiny deficit and bitched about it to no end. He magnified tiny Carter transgressions, and that's why your memory makes a mountain out of a molehill. This country is going down the toilet very soon. We'll all agree it's unsolvable by 2020. It'll require martial law by 2040 to stay in existence. China will put us out of our misery by 2080. Reagan was a showman. He inherited nothing like this.
I voted for him the 2nd time (the only republican I ever voted for), and I did live it. Before the 1980 election, when I was still in high school and living with my parents, they told me on more than one occasion that I better enjoy life while I could because the way things were headed, there weren't going to be any good times for anyone. The future looked that bleak. I remember what an optimist Reagan was. Morning in America. Our best days are ahead of us. It was a radical change from where things had been and where they appeared to be going before he was nominated. I remember his speeches praised regular citizens as heroes. I related part of my story from back then. I was making $16K salary, about 2x minimum wage. We put down $2500 on a $50K house. When we applied for our loan, the interest rate was 18.75%. By the time the sale closed, 90 days later, the interest rate was 12 7/8%, which saved us $450/month in mortgage payments. The savings was $160,000 over the term of the loan - more than 3x what the price of the home was. I remember the "get rich in real estate" guys advertising on TV that you could pay $0 in taxes. For every $10K in income you had, all you needed was to own $100K worth of real estate - the write offs and depreciation would zero out your income and you'd pay no tax. The rich were taxed at 70%+ rate but paid not even $.01. Reagan cut the tax rates, made fewer tax brackets, and eliminated those kinds of deductions so the rich had to actually pay taxes. I remember the bottom 6,000,000 taxpayers were removed from the income tax rolls altogether in the deal. Speaking of the Rich, there were just 4,000 $millionaires when he took office and 64,000 when he left office. It paid off to be an entrepreneur. Companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, Apple, Intel, Cicso, Cingular (who was rebranded AT&T), Sprint, MCI and many others were established or became well established. The Internet we're now using was a science fair project until his defense spending drove it to become a real thing (it was a DARPA project). I remember the large Japanese corporations like Mitsubishi dwarfed our largest corporations when he took office. I remember him making a speech telling us that things were going to get a lot worse, for a while, before they got better. And that things worked out exactly as he described. I remember him repeatedly making speeches asking for the line item veto and balanced budget amendment. I remember his budget proposals were declared D.O.A. in the House (the Senate was republican controlled for his first term). I remember him pulling out the omnibus spending bill he was forced to sign or let the govt. stop altogether, and saying "never again." I remember the disaster that occurred when the decimated military tried a rescue mission to free the hostages in Iran during Carter's term, then when Reagan took office he spent a lot to modernize the military. I remember he made a challenge equally as bold as Kennedy's "we shall go to the moon in this decade" one. Star Wars it was called. The Russians were so scared of it... I remember him and Gorby meeting in Iceland and almost eliminating every nuke in both nations' arsenals. They laid the groundwork for massive cuts in both arsenals in any case. I remember him going to Berlin and making a speech, "Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" I remember thinking we would go to war with Iran and I was ready to serve. Yeah, it was really effed up. Reagan was a strange bird somtimes. He violently opposed the ERA, then appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. He was a fierce anti-communist, was caught on microphone saying "when do we start the bombing" (a joke) early in his first term and then made peace with the Russians and effectively ended the cold war. He set a record (at the time) for number of vetoes, but ended up signing budgets that yielded big deficits (He told Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neal, "I'm going to take away your allowance.").
When you were making $16K I was making $21K and had the brains not to buy when the interest rate was about to fall 6 points. I'm glad you were bailed out, but you shouldn't have made the mistake in the first place. I was looking at condos with a realtor, but wisely had cold feet and did not buy. Your memories seem to be from a childish, worshipping point of view. Here in the Northwest, we weren't so one-sided about Reagan. It's too much trouble to tell you point by point where you are overdoing your adulation. Edit: Of course I caught his sarcasm.
My prediction: It will get worse and worse. A little faster in the Republican years, a little more slowly in the Democratic years. China is playing a whole different game than the Soviet Union did. And this me generation of the American rich are playing a whole different game than their rally-around-the-flag rich parents did. (Denny, thanks for the help, but you don't need to tell me that this one was sarcastic too.)
If you make more than me, they should tax you more heavily so I don't have to pay as much in taxes. And when interest rates were 20% for so long and had fallen, it looked like a deal. Plus we had a baby on the way and the place we were renting was in a horribly mismanaged complex. The roof of the building our apartment was in literally collapsed on us during a rain/sleet/snow storm and there was 3 inches of water on the floor of every apartment in the building. Yet my story is EVERYONE's story. At $16K, maybe I was approaching being lower middle class.
Yes, people have been warning that everything is going to hell for, well, probably forever. Certainly as long as I can remember, which is several decades. They all had arguments and charts and graphs showing our impending doom. And they've all been totally wrong. Life is pretty fucking great here in 2012. So I'm fairly confident that the doomsayers of today are wrong too. barfo
Sure. And, you know, I might get hit by a bus tomorrow if I walk in front of one. There's an infinite number of bad things that might happen that one could fret about. But, it's a nice day, I think I'll go find an outdoor table and have some lunch. barfo
Really bad things "might" happen if you go warp 9 straight for the sun. What is your expectation in that case?
Any problems Reagan supposedly inherited were deliberately created by the Republican Party and Reagan's campaign during Carter's last 2 years through: 1. the treasonous back-door deals forged with Iran to keep the hostages prisoners until after Reagan became president in exchange for illegally supplied weapons financed by smuggling heroin into the US and flooding our streets with it. 2. the sabotaging by our own military of the Iran Hostage Rescue which would have assured Carter a landslide win for his second term and the immediate leaking to the mnedia of it's failure to prevent any follow-up attempts. 3. the concerted actions by the financial and industrial sectors to deliberately escalate inflation and unemployment by tripling rates for mortgages and orchestrating production slowdowns, again in exchange for promises from the Reagan camp for de-regulation and union-busting if he was elected.
Exactly. You have absolutely no clue what a great country America was before Reagan came into power. Antidotes and soundbites is where you get your "facts", because sadly for you your parents created you too late. jlprk and I are were fortunate enough to live in america while it was still a pretty cool place to be, with some semblance of freedom, a measure of representation for the working man, a sense of pride that we were all striving for equality and compassion toward our fellow man. You'll never know that feeling, and to those who lived it your "facts" are just the babblings of a gullible little child repeating tales he heard on the playground.
http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/mortgage_rates/charts.asp?Y=1971&M=1 This simple chart confirms the ridiculous gouging of average Americans by the banks that was permitted during Reagan's entire 2 terms. The worst financial ripoff of Americans ever orchestrated before Baby Bush came along and set up the Great Foreclosure Scheme. Nixon and Ford made the mess before anyone had ever heard of Jimmy Carter, and he was used as a scapegoat/stepping stone to continue the raping of Americans. As the chart clearly shows rates were around 8-10% for most of Carter's term, escalated drastically to 12+% just before the election to insure Reagan would gain the Presidency, then did a brief drop back to 12% after the election only to make Reagan look good. By September of Reagan's second year rates were a record high 18% and stayed ridiculously high throughout his 2 terms. Only after Clinton passed his first budget did rates begin their slow decline back to normalcy. Trying to blame 25+ years of price-gouging by the financial sector on a peanut farmer who has devoted his life to helping house the poor and mediating peace in all corners of the mostly undeveloped world is the desperate act of a shortsighted fool.
Looks like they spiked upward 1/2 way through his term, as when his domestic and fiscal policies kicked in.
