What was Reagan's chief legacy? "It was tax cuts for the rich and budget policies that tripled the Federal deficit as well as financial deregulation that paved the hellish road to our current economic situation."
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
I think the beautiful legacy of Ronald Reagan was that he was able to prove, for once and for all albeit not without cost, that supply side economics actually does pull money away from the poor and middle classes and put it back into the hands of the suppliers. Without Reagan, how would we have ever known that this system is as ineffectual and obsolete as communism itself???
ReplyDeleteI'm stoked myself. As a presidential scholar I'm pretty pumped about the Gipper's centennial. Thank you for posting.
I always preferred the earlier term for trickle down economics, aka supply side econmics.... horse and sparrow economics.
ReplyDeleteThe analogy there was that horses were like the engine of the economy, and the oats fed to the horse were the benefits like tax cuts to the rich that enabled it to live and function. The oats left in the resulting manure were the equivalent of the trickle down, and the many sparrows which ate the left-over undigested oats out of the stinking, steaming piles of horse excrement were the 90% of the rest of the citizens of the United States.
There are worse things to be criticized for than "let them eat cake" when denigrating the overwhelming majority of us - let them eat poop would be one of them. But describing the effective attitude of those who blindly adore secular St. Ronnie is pretty much 'let them eat poop'.
Or maybe just poop on them all?
http://www.experiencefestival.com/john_kenneth_galbraith_-_horse_and_sparrow_economics
I think it's funny how people always blame the president when things go wrong (or right) when it takes a majority of congress to agree with him to get what the president wants.
ReplyDeleteThe president may be considered the leader, but he's really can't do much all by himself.
...Orygunner...
You're right, Orygunner, our society tends to break up history into four or eight year chunks and assign blame or credit for new legislation, wars, policy changes, etc. on whoever was the president at the time.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I was actually trying to blame Reagan for the world-wide depression that occured 5 years after his beatification, nothing that happened during his presidency.
I didn't follow politics at all back then. But what I noticed was that Carter worked on freeing the Iran Hostages for months and they came home on Reagan's watch, I think it was immediately after he took office. That made me think those dirty bastards arranged it that way so he could get that big feather in his cap at the terrible cost of leaving those hostages there months longer than they could have been. The powers that be decided any cost was worth it to deprive Carter from that honor and to give it to Reagan.
ReplyDeleteOf course this confirmed my dislike of politics and politicians, especially the conservative ones. I remained apolitical for almost two more decades.