Opinion of Ronald Reagan?

[Benjamin Frank]

TheReckoning is on a roll this week.

What the amount of threads he's hijacked and the number of posters refusing to let go of his bait

I swear up and down, I am NOT a troll.

OK Nixon.

[Benjamin Frank]

With the singular exception of allowing Paul Volcker to raise interest rates to choke off inflation which caused, to that time, the deepest recession from 1982 to the spring of 1983 since The Great Depression, the Reagan Administration can, I think, accurately be summed up with the phrase:

"Short term gain for long term pain."

In these areas at a minimum:
1.The crushing of private sector labor unions

2.Cutting taxes which ballooned the federal government deficit and debt (and also led to the reemergence of inflation which ultimately sank his successor, George H W Bush.)

3.Cutting environmental and health and safety regulations which have led to environmental degradation.  Jimmy Carter did deregulate the trucking and airlines industries, but he never cut the environmental or health and safety regulations on them.

4.Encouraging the 'greed is good' ethos which led to such things as the Savings and Loan scandal.

All of these things combined have also led to the present situation of the large income and wealth inequality we see in the United States, and the concept of 'late stage capitalism' which is not just on the left, but is also on the right, with such things as opposition to free trade and suspicion of big business, especially 'big ag' and 'big pharma.'  (Not saying they're wrong here.)

It wasn't out of nowhere that at times in the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump essentially ran on and won by repudiating Reagan's record.

[Benjamin Frank]

The first President I voted for and the best in my lifetime.

His 1980 tax cuts raided the SSA trust fund while giving huge tax cuts to millionaires. Iran Contra sold weapons to our enemies, he isn't Saint😭😭😭

No he isn't, but it speaks to the (lack of) quality of presidents in our lifetimes.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were vastly better Presidents than Ronald Reagan.

Of course, their generally positive Presidencies were undercut by their successors:  George W Bush and Donald Trump, easily the two worst Presidents since the start of the 20th Century.

[Benjamin Frank]

The first President I voted for and the best in my lifetime.

His 1980 tax cuts raided the SSA trust fund while giving huge tax cuts to millionaires. Iran Contra sold weapons to our enemies, he isn't Saint😭😭😭

No he isn't, but it speaks to the (lack of) quality of presidents in our lifetimes.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were vastly better Presidents than Ronald Reagan.

What makes you so confident in that assessment, given how most independent political scientists disagree?

Because I teach history and economics and I know of the same events they do.  I believe what is going on is the right wing political scientists and historians in these surveys deliberately vote Reagan as the best President ever (or, at lowest, third best) in order to put him higher up the rankings than he would be otherwise.

Other than that, I can understand also understand some of it.  After Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter, all men essentially defeated by their offices, there were, at least, arguments in academia that the office of the Presidency should be replaced in favor of the Swiss governing model.

Reagan did restore the idea of a 'strong Presidency' and he also did play a role in successfully addressing the two top issues of the day: inflation/stagflation and the Cold War.

Gorbachev deserves the credit for ending the Cold War and Reagan's brinksmanship with the Soviet Union could have ended in a much different way, but Reagan deserves the credit for recognizing that Gorbachev was genuine.  In this, Reagan had to marginalize his own cold war hawks like Richard Perle.

Beyond that though, I invite you to try to argue that Reagan's Presidency was not 'short term gain for long term pain.'

However, because of these two major accomplishments, this is why I put Ronald Reagan as the 10th best President since 1901, out of the 20 Presidents.

[Benjamin Frank]

Yes, and the domino theory is of course why Iran is today communist. As is Honduras. And the
Caribbean.

I’m not saying Domino Theory is 100% true, but what makes you so confident that those places wouldn’t be communist if Reagan hadn’t had contributed to the stop of the spread of Communism in there respective regions?

My time travel experiment to an alternative timeline was very informative.

So you’re admitting you have no idea?

Partisan hackery like this is why America is going nowhere. You believing you know better than 99% of political scientists is no better than Republicans who do the same to Obama (well, maybe a little bit, because I can’t ignore the racism in my party).

You have no way of knowing either.  We do know though that the Domino theory in Southeast Asia was wrong.  Even Cambodia and Laos probably wouldn't have fallen to the Communists had Nixon not destabilized their governments with his illegal bombing.

[Benjamin Frank]

Yes, and the domino theory is of course why Iran is today communist. As is Honduras. And the
Caribbean.

I’m not saying Domino Theory is 100% true, but what makes you so confident that those places wouldn’t be communist if Reagan hadn’t had contributed to the stop of the spread of Communism in there respective regions?

My time travel experiment to an alternative timeline was very informative.

So you’re admitting you have no idea?

Partisan hackery like this is why America is going nowhere. You believing you know better than 99% of political scientists is no better than Republicans who do the same to Obama (well, maybe a little bit, because I can’t ignore the racism in my party).

You have no way of knowing either.  We do know though that the Domino theory in Southeast Asia was wrong.  Even Cambodia and Laos probably wouldn't have fallen to the Communists had Nixon not destabilized their governments with his illegal bombing.

True, but I do believe that SE Asia is different from Latin America since SEA is much more diverse, so nothing spread much in those regions.

Plus, you can’t ignore the role that neighboring China played in the spread of Communism in that region (and later, Vietnam), even if those were just one part of the equation.

1.Central American nations have gone to war with each other not long before Reagan. The Football War between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 is an example of that.  Central American nations are more diverse than you seem to think.

2.Reagan dropped to 13th in the latest Sienna Times College Poll of Historians and Political Scientists (down from 9th), I doubt he's ranked as high as 14th by Democrats.

[Benjamin Frank]

The first President I voted for and the best in my lifetime.

His 1980 tax cuts raided the SSA trust fund while giving huge tax cuts to millionaires. Iran Contra sold weapons to our enemies, he isn't Saint😭😭😭

No he isn't, but it speaks to the (lack of) quality of presidents in our lifetimes.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were vastly better Presidents than Ronald Reagan.

What makes you so confident in that assessment, given how most independent political scientists disagree?

Because I teach history and economics and I know of the same events they do.  I believe what is going on is the right wing political scientists and historians in these surveys deliberately vote Reagan as the best President ever (or, at lowest, third best) in order to put him higher up the rankings than he would be otherwise.

Other than that, I can understand also understand some of it.  After Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter, all men essentially defeated by their offices, there were, at least, arguments in academia that the office of the Presidency should be replaced in favor of the Swiss governing model.

Reagan did restore the idea of a 'strong Presidency' and he also did play a role in successfully addressing the two top issues of the day: inflation/stagflation and the Cold War.

Gorbachev deserves the credit for ending the Cold War and Reagan's brinksmanship with the Soviet Union could have ended in a much different way, but Reagan deserves the credit for recognizing that Gorbachev was genuine.  In this, Reagan had to marginalize his own cold war hawks like Richard Perle.

Beyond that though, I invite you to try to argue that Reagan's Presidency was not 'short term gain for long term pain.'

However, because of these two major accomplishments, this is why I put Ronald Reagan as the 10th best President since 1901, out of the 20 Presidents.

Let me play Devil's Advocate on that. First regarding the elimination of stagflation / inflation. Could one not argue that inflation was ground out of the economy only at the cost of absolutely brutal depression level unemployment, the highest the country had seen in over 40 years? Furthermore wasn't it also minimized by oil development in Mexico and Venezuela which help to break the OPEC Bubble Witch had been screwing Carter and Ford previously? Please recall that in one of these touted rankings by us historians that plays Greg and 11th and actually listed the presence of on various categories such as dealing with Congress, communication with the public, Etc, Reagan was ranked near the top in the category of "Luck". This is arguably exhibit a

I'll particularly dispute the Cold War mythology. Just because Reagan barely controlled The excesses of the truly dangerous Hawks in his cabinet Like Richard Perle - - widely called The Prince of Darkness in Washington for his views - - was that particularly much of an accomplishment? After all, he couldn't control Admiral Poindexter, Oliver North, etcetera from running a shadow foreign policy. It seems like not getting into a hot War of great magnitude seems to be a very low level threshold of success, and certainly doesn't speak to any of Reagan's policies actually materially contributing towards the end of the Cold War.

1.Oil prices stabilized sometime after Reagan became President, but were still high long after the end of the recession in 1983.

https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices/historical-crude-oil-prices-table/

It was not until 1985-1986 that oil prices collapsed.

I agree with the rest
2. At the same time as Reagan allowed Paul Volcker to enact monetary policies that Reagan knew would place the economy into a deep recession and cause massive unemployment ("if not now, when?  If not us, who?"  Reagan quoted when asked about this),  Reagan simultaneously demonized people on welfare ("welfare queens in their limousines") and massively cut welfare spending.

3.As I mentioned earlier, Reagan's large government budget deficits led to the return of inflation.  By 1990, the inflation rate (CPI) had gone from 1.9% per annum in 1986 (no doubt lowered by the collapse of oil prices) to 5.4% in 1990.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA

The higher real interest rates the Federal Reserve implemented to re-fight inflation ultimately destroyed the George H.W Bush Presidency.

4.In regards to Reagan and Gorbachev.  I mean, they did reach an agreement to actually reduce the number of nuclear weapons each side had.  I think Reagan deserves credit for recognizing Gorbachev as a different type of Soviet leader and not being bound by cold war thinking.