Don’t forget the war on drugs
A lot of younger people simply don’t know that the age we all consider the golden age of middle class America (40s-70s) was so because we TAXED THE FUCK OUT OF THE WEALTHY. As we should.
If we do not return to doing so, our quality of life is going to continue to decline indefinitely.
TAX. THE. FUCKING. RICH.
DON’T VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT DOESN’T RUN ON TAXING THE RICH.
Conversely, I think most of the county would rabidly support anyone who ran on that platform… Even most Trump voters
Not even the Democrats could do this with a Democrat controlled Congress and presidency
I was here but barely too young to vote at the time (not that it mattered since he had so many people enthralled like trump has done). No, I will never forget how he (along with some others like Newt Gingrich) ruined everything, so just as I was getting started in adult life, things were already starting to go to hell and it hasn’t stopped since.
Reagan really was the beginning of the end for this country, and though a couple times it looked like we might, we were never able to turn things around. And now here we are, experiencing the culmination of his work of turning America into a kleptocratic oligarchy.
Trump is just the Result of Reagan’s transformation of American politics and culture to greed first and only.
Trump is a vulture picking this nation’s corpse clean. Ronald Reagan and Jack Welch killed us half a century ago.
Absolutely
Almost every problem america has to date, you could blame on Reagan.
And you would be right far, far, faaaar more often than you’d be wrong.
Defnitely!
Did anyone else know that they recently made a film about this fucking filth?
They were obviously trying way too hard to control the narrative of this fucking piece of shit, but to also spark some kind of patriotism in all those old fucks who fell for reagan’s bullshit lies, and now trump’s bullshit lies.
I almost wanted to go and rip their little signs they had for this movie straight out of the ground. Ugh. Disgusting.
Looking at the IMDb listing, is this shedding Reagan in a good light?
Or is it a documentary on how he completely fucked up?
Dennis Quaid is a piece of shit.
“National debt” obscures the practical consequence. National debt is just money that has been added into the economy but not taxed back out.
It’s not necessarily bad to ramp up spending, if that new money has somewhere healthy to go. (Mega projects like Medicare For All or the Green New Deal would be prime candidates.)
So where did it go?
Well, take a look at Reagan’s reign from 81-89…
There’s the problem.
…and this chart stops at 2012
precisely. the distribution of wealth is a more important indicator of economic health than simply looking at the national debt or total tax revenues. imo we need to increase taxes on the ultra rich, not because we need to reduce the deficit but because taxes prevent the obscene accumulation of wealth (and the resulting regulatory capture epitomized by modern American oligarchy).
On one hand, it does make sense to lower taxes if taxes are notably harming the economy or harming economic recovery, and under Reagan we DID have a long economic boom. Dropping taxes on the rich by 40% was likely unnecessary, as even ~20% would have been enough for a stable recovery.
The flip side to that is that it installed in Republicans the idea that taxes go down == economy go up, which is nowhere near the truth (as shown by the Kansas Experiment ) and is one of (IMO) the three major shifts in the GOP that has turned them into the absolute shitters they are today. The others FWIW are Gingrich’s Contract with America, or more particularly the idea he presented to the GOP that they can never let the DNC have a win even if it would benefit the GOP, and the Southern Strategy.
Trickle down economics, contract with America, and the southern strategy. The new unholy trinity.
He really didn’t though, it was fake and funded through over a trillion dollars in national debt …
I’m pretty sure he’s the president that also started using money ear marked for social security for the general fund. SS is fully funded through Miss 2030, the Republicans want to get rid of it to hide the fact they stole the money for other shit …
And he sold those missiles because Congress had made it illegal to fund rape/murder squads in Nicaragua.
The money was off the books and then sent to the death squads killing innocent farmers.
Unlike Nixon, Congress was not willing to impeach, so Regan denied everything and only a few staffers were prosecuted.
Bush Sr pardoned them.
Republicans: not even once.
They also were smuggling Crack into the states to fund the contras (who are terrorists)
Yes they were.
The contras were elected to government so…
And Oliver North’s gold remains buried under a home in Langley
The deinstitutionalization and movement to prison was something that began long before Reagan. Really goes back to the end of ww2 and Kennedy. though reagan definitely accelerated it by a great deal by decreasing budgets substantially and increasing incarceration rates significantly
Reagan was a monster though. What a great day it was when he died
For more information, lookup the impact of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on mental health services in the United States.
TBH, some of that deinstitutionalization could be written off to being gay no longer being a mental health issue, etc.
That’s actually inverse to this. Homosexuality formally entered the dsm in 1952 which made institutionalization for it more common, not less, although institutionalization certainly existed beforehand (eg ww2 draft would decline for homosexuality and basically refer to conversion therapy)
This is the “lavender scare”. Much of the anti lgbt rhetoric today roots back to this era - that homosexuality is something to be pathologized, it can be cured, it is deviancy, a threat to national safety (lavender scare and red scare being analogous, thought process being all the men turning queer would make us a nation of sissies ripe for being taken over by the commies, basically. Lesbian erasure from this narrative was totally a thing (although they still got the abusive treatment)
As a result they got shock treatment, aversion therapy, and even lobotomies. This was through the early 60s and it wasn’t until 1973 that the diagnosis was formally removed. Obviously conversion therapy still happens today but the state sanctioned institutionalization form was mostly over by the mid to late 60s, though it took some time to die out in certain regions
A blight on our country and on the history of our mental health system. Disgusting
The shock treatment thing never fully went away it’s just used on gay teenagers at concentration camps their parents send them to now as opposed to being a state ran thing
Yes conversion therapy never fully went away although some states have banned it and others have banned the use of shock as aversive despite allowing conversion therapy to continue
To clarify: there are several things people refer to as shock therapy
Ect or electro convulsive therapy is sometimes called shock therapy. This is not conversion therapy. This is evidence based for treatment resistant depression and bipolar disorder. This has an ugly history but the modern version can be very helpful if you’ve had years of no success with treatment. That said this should be something that you discuss and consent to
Conversion therapy is a form of Aversive conditioning. Shock therapy in this context is using electricity as the aversive stimulus. This is a behavioral conditioning technique to pair stimuli. It is theoretically simple and essentially based on the work of Pavlov. I take a thing you like and consistently pair it with something aversive. Eventually you associate the thing with the aversive.
So I may show you gay pornography and give an electric shock. But any aversive can theoretically work: I could show you two screens: gay pornography on one and gory death shit on the other. I could get one of those air horns and blast it to surprise you. Etc. modern conversion therapy goes way harder than this, they’ll do weird fucking shit like put a pressure sensing ring on your cock and show you hot guys, then introduce the aversive when you tingle.
Do you see the issue here? They believe they are making gay pornography aversive to you. But what’s really happening is that they are making expression of sexuality aversive. In the weenie monitor example it becomes getting an erection. This is because the people doing this are not only monsters, they are shitty at their job. They do not understand (or more likely willfully misunderstand) basic risks of what they are implementing and they also do not plan for basic realities like generalization (eg if I make homosexual erotic content aversive to you what’s to stop you generalizing that disgust to all erotic content? That’s a risk they’re willing to take, apparently, and a part of informed consent I bet money they do not explain (amongst many many other things))
Conversion therapy is torture. Aversive conditioning in general is. Anyone who does it should be in prison. They are monsters who care more about their agenda than their clients well being (which they likely do not care about at all)
True, although nasty Christians are going to court to try to overturn bands on conversion therapy because it’s their religion so they shouldn’t have to follow the law. Yeah that’s where at is a country. And people wonder why I have a firmly negative opinion of Christianity and don’t buy the excuses people give and it’s defense
i think executive order 10450 was the last vestige of this era to be removed from our governing bodies and it lasted until 2016; 2 years after it bit me in the ass.
i also think that this was the reason why we didn’t enact the equal rights amendment; to keep access to this kind prejudice alive as evidenced by the incrementalism that project 2025 advocated since the '80s.
Thanks for that info
He wasn’t elected until 1980. Look at your graphs again.
Yes, the massive fall of deinstitutionalization began in the 60s as indicated on my graph? And as I said it began long before him? I don’t understand what you are disagreeing with
Even the incarceration rise started before him in the early 70s. He just is the one that turned this to a million with the war on drugs
My bad I didn’t even see the text above it. Just underneath it. Ignore my statement.
How dare you talk like this about the republicans Jesus? And they are still selling less taxes one the 1% cause they create jobs 😅
thank him for no-brakes neoliberalism. i wish this piece of shit had only ruined his own shitty country but instead we were forced into his insane bullshit too.
And don’t forget ending the fairness doctrine, one of the contributions to the polarization of US politics.
That’s a big one
Don’t forget his campaign for governor led to the massive student loan issues we have today. College was just starting to be accessible to everyone that wasn’t a white man, and they just couldn’t have that!
He was terrible, and perhaps worse: he was so popular. He got two terms, then his vice president got a term. So popular it seemed to be (to me) that he was the reason we ultimately got stuck with the “Third Way” democrats, which is when the working class was finally completely abandoned.
He really screwed us all
Reagan broke the unions. The group that literally funded labor and the Democrats for decades upon decades. Third way Democrats arose out of necessity from the fall of the unions. They didn’t abandon the unions anymore than the unions abandoned them. The unions became unable to fund them like they used to. And Democrats now be holding to corporate donors became unable to support humans like they used to.
His administration was when the republicans really started running with the idea of fucking with people’s minds. “Morning in America” turned a shitload of former Democrats into republican voters who voted themselves and their children into a shithole they’d never get out of.
See also; “The Southern Strategy”
Yeah, maybe. I mean, the republicans at this time did start to resonate with the public, but I think it had more to do with the times and with Reagan himself.
Reagan was much more likeable than the likes of Goldwater, Buckley, or any other figure at the time. And he was attractive to the evangelicals, which became a whole new arm (with issues) of the party.
Also, of course, the economy of the 70s was just right for a party that could lean into hate, fear, & greed.
Reagan, though. He could sell all of it in a way that few others would have been able to pull off. I remember wondering at the time how he could draw so many in. People just liked him, horrible as he was.
Oh there’s no maybe about it. Reagan - “an actor?!” was the perfect foil for photo ops and propaganda. His lickspittle Michael Deaver created them such that as wikipedia says,
As Deputy Chief of Staff, Deaver worked primarily on media management, forming how the public perceived Reagan, sometimes by engineering press events so that the White House set the networks’ agenda for covering him.
Which was a quantum leap from the flashbulb-handshake photo ops of the earlier presidents.
He coincided with Mtv, cable television, and the nascent seedlings of Fox News. In every demented rapist presser where Orange Julius presents stacks of binders filled with blank paper is drawn from the work Deaver did with Reagan.
Also remember that while Reagan had more public office experience than the demented rapist, he wasn’t trained on anything - he wasn’t a lawyer, didn’t study foreign policy, wasn’t in the military - he was an actor. And so while he was a conservative at heart most of the ridiculous idiocies were pitched to him and pending any kind of ok were run by evil toadies, just as it is today.
So yeah, he was probably nice enough as a neighbor or something, but as a President he created huge waves of evil we’re still getting hit with today. (And which were called out at the time, btw.)
It’s the power of propaganda.
Reaganomics! SMH.
