I Liked Ronald Reagan

I did. One of the first things he did when he came into office was raise active-duty military pay by 14% or so. That was not the big deal then that it would seem now, for inflation had been running in the double-digit range for the previous two years and had not gone below 7% or so for all of the Carter Administration's time. It had been fairly high ever since 1973. St. Jimmy the Last's remedy, in part, was to hold down military pay raises to 5.5% a year, which particularly hurt the families of married enlisted men. Reagan's first raise barely covered the rate of inflation for the previous year, which at least meant that military families were not losing ground for one year.

Having said that, it is clear that the Reagan presidency was founded on bad assumptions. First was that cutting taxes for the wealthy would be good for everyone. In 1980, George H.W. Bush called it "voodoo economics" and he was right. Reagan's tax cuts for the rich ushered in an era of massive budget deficits. President George H.W. Bush started the process of trying to rein in the deficits, for which he was rewarded with defeat in 1992.[1]

The second bad assumption was that private contractors could take over government functions and do it both better and cheaper. This has turned out to be a fallacy. The use of contractors in Iraq resulted in the deaths of soldiers due to shoddy construction and shoddy wiring. The use of contractors in Iraq, particularly for security functions, contributed to a hostile environment between American soldiers and the people of Iraq. The arrogance of one company in particular was the cause at least two major battles.

What has happened with private contractors is that the Federal government winds up operating as a training school. People go to work for the government, learn to do something, then they leave the government. They go to work for the contractors, at a far higher the of pay, only to do the same things for the federal government as contractors. They make more money, the contractors get rich, and it is the taxpayer who pays for this. The CIA, according to reports, has been hard hit by this legal scam. So has the Department of Defense, where procurement offices, which oversee contractors, are often virtually run by contractors.

The third bad assumption was that business would do the right and honorable thing if only they were not regulated. That this was patently false was seen at the tail end of the Reagan years, when the Saving & Loan industry collapsed under the weight of huge losses generated by unrestrained bad lending. That, of course, was not enough of a signal to the Acolytes of Reagan (and Rand), who pushed for so much deregulation of the financial industry that less than 20 years after the S&L Crisis, the entire financial system was on the verge of collapse, due to unregulated bad practices.

Deregulation and unregulation have brought us airlines that make their pilots fly past the point of exhaustion. It has brought us exploitation of the poorest workers by companies both large and small. It has brought a return to poisoned water supplies. But it has made the people at the very top of the economic ladder vastly more wealthy, which was probably the point all along.

I liked Ronald Reagan. But it is clear that his assumptions of how to run the Federal government and how to manage the economy were wrong. Those who kept on following Reagan's path have proven to be either motivated by pure greed, by failed ideology or were simply just retards.[2]

[1]The actions of his idiot namesake son are largely outside of this discussion.
[2] The idiot mentioned in footnote 1 comes to mind.