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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.
Not even the Democrats could do this with a Democrat controlled Congress and presidency
~~could~~ want
The democrats are cowards, the republicans are evil. If there ever is another proper election in the US, vote independent.
it worked for mexico almost 10 years ago.
that is, until we regime change them.... again.
They wouldn't want to do that because it would not serve their self-interests.
Do you honestly expect the fox to prevent itself from guarding the henhouse?
Conversely, I think most of the county would rabidly support anyone who ran on that platform... Even most Trump voters
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
Reganomics. Trickle down economics. Only thing that trickles is piss and shit.
formerly known as the horse-and-sparrow theory: the idea that feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat.
I will never know what it is like to be in pre-Reagan America and for that alone that man should burn in hell waiting for heaven to trickle down.
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!
This actually works incredibly poorly or very well depending on your opinion if you just applied it to random problems in the US that are like micro issues.
Toilet clogged? Reagan's fault
Reagan, Nixon, or Dubya. You bet on Reagan for safety, Dubya if it sounds more recent, Nixon is a dark horse to bet on who pays big whenever you get it right.
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
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.
Not to glorify mental institutions, which are often vehicles of state oppression and state violence.
Having both been homeless and in a psych ward, I preferred being homeless (granted I could sleep in public transit).
TBH, the mental hospitals were a mess and rife with abuse.
But rather that invest money into improving them, he got rid of them by branding it “de-institutionalization”. Made it sound like he was freeing people.
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
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"
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.
“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).
I think we need an entirely different economic model, where there are hard limits on income, wealth, and assets. I don't mind people being wealthy, but that definition should be something like: "I am a CEO, I get paid twice as much as a waitress. I own a very nice house, a small yacht, and spend time riding horses at the country club. My husband works as a mechanic, and only makes $10,000 less a year than me."
It would require a huge rethink on economy, the nature of wealth, implementing a strong UBI, and replacing the dollar with a fresh currency. Still, I think a complete replacement of how things were done would be key for America to become a nation worthy of the people who live in it.
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?
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - CIA Director William J. Casey to President Ronald Reagan, in 1981
while having early onset alzheimers at the time, which was hidden from the public, and the administration was mostly controlled by nancy and the cabinet.
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.
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 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.
And Oliver North's gold remains buried under a home in Langley
They also were smuggling Crack into the states to fund the contras (who are terrorists)