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Rand Paul Risks Telling the Truth About Ronald Reagan

The effectiveness of Reagan’s presidency is no more than a right-wing myth.
BY CJ Werleman, AlterNet


Reagan, alongside Bush the younger, was arguably the most destructive of all U.S. presidents, for he bankrupted America both financially and morally.


The path to the Republican Party presidential nomination travels through Ronald Reagan’s ghost. From Iowa to South Carolina, GOP primaries are often reduced to a competition for the number of times a candidate can invoke his name. If Jesus hadn’t died at such a youthful age, Reagan’s image would have been what right-wing Americans imagined when they thought of an elderly Messiah. For a conservative to offer anything less than pious servitude to his memory is to violate the fourth of the Ten Commandments: Thou shall not take the name of the Lord in vain, which is exactly the sin committed by one of the 2016 GOP packleaders, Sen. Rand Paul.

The magazine Mother Jones compiled an array of video clips showing the Kentucky senator casting the spiritual leader of today’s conservative movement as anything but the fiscal disciplinarian right-wing revisionists like to remember him for. In a variety of speeches given between 2008 and 2010, Paul repeatedly stated that Democratic President Jimmy Carter had a better record on fiscal discipline than Reagan. Heresy!

In a speech given to student Republicans at Western Kentucky University, Paul said you can trace the Republican Party’s hypocrisy on spending and deficits back to Reagan:

Some say, well that's fine, but there were good old days. We did at one time … When we had Reagan, we were fiscal conservatives. Well, unfortunately, even that wasn't true. When Reagan was elected in 1980, the first bill they passed was called the Gramm-Latta bill of 1981, and Republicans pegged it as this great step forward. Well, Jimmy Carter's last budget was about $34 or $36 billion in debt. Well, it turns out, Reagan's first budget turned out to be $110 billion dollars in debt. And each successive year, the deficit rose throughout Reagan's two terms.

In another speech, Paul observes that “the deficit exploded because domestic spending rose faster under Reagan, so did military, but domestic spending rose faster under Reagan than under Jimmy Carter.” He goes on to warn Republicans that “we have to admit our failings because we're not going to get new people unless we become believable as a party again.”

This, among other remarks, is a breathtaking pronouncement from the presumed leader of today’s conservative movement. It’s hard to overstate how severe this self-inflicting blow is to both his political ambitions and the legitimacy of movement conservative’s ideology. It’s a blow because Paul’s recollection of the Reagan presidency is consistent with reality.

Republicans are fond of labeling Carter the worst president of the 20th century, but that does not square with facts. Reagan’s approval rate was only 43 percent six months after leaving office. Carter’s approval was above 60 percent. Polls don’t mean everything but they do take a snapshot of a moment in time, and history has a way of remembering presidents fondly long after they’ve left office. In other words, we forget how bad the bad presidents truly were. Reagan, alongside Bush the younger, was arguably the most destructive of all U.S. presidents, for he bankrupted America both financially and morally.

Republicans revere the memory of Reagan. For the Right, he is their Kennedy. In any poll taken of Republican voters, he’s popularly regarded as the greatest U.S. president alongside Lincoln. But the effectiveness of his presidency is a right-wing media-generated myth that remembers his poetry rather than his prose. We remember, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” “The shining city on the hill,” and “Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.” We forget the economic destruction his policies inflicted on the middle class and the nation’s poor.

Pablo Mayhew, a columnist for Raw Story, wrote, “The Republicans are terribly fond of revisionism, which permits them to commit heinous atrocities while they are in office on the hunch that no one in America will remember what they did a decade later … and still fewer will even care. Tricky Dick benefited from this—and so did Ronald Reagan.”

In 1981, Reagan passed his first budget—a budget that included a $38 billion ($90 billion in today’s dollars) tax cut to the wealthiest Americans. Reagan initially slashed the top income-tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. To make way for this massive tax break for the wealthiest few, his budget included spending cuts to programs that benefit the lower-middle-class: Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits and infrastructure spending.

But guess what? In 1982, the economy did the exact opposite of what “voodoo economics” had promised to do. The economy slipped into a slight recession, and Reagan was forced to admit that the balanced budget he promised would not happen. Duh!

By the following year, Reagan raised taxes dramatically and other increases followed. In fact, the 1982 tax hike was the largest peacetime tax increase on the middle class in American history. That same year he also raised the gasoline tax. In 1983, Reagan hiked taxes again. Despite his reputation as a tax cutter, Reagan raised taxes three times, and tripled the deficit during his eight years in office. If Reagan were transported to 2016, he’d never survive a Republican primary challenge against Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, or Sarah Palin.

During the Reagan years, the debt ballooned to nearly $3 trillion, roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the 20th century had done altogether. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, while income inequality exploded. More significantly, Reagan’s tax increases primarily hit the middle class, while he shielded the wealthy. The main reason he’s remembered as a tax-cutter is because of what he did to tax rates for the super-rich: He slashed the top rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, and income inequality has soared ever since, so that today, the top 1 percent of Americans controls a quarter of the nation’s wealth, as opposed to 8 percent in the year Reagan was inaugurated president.

Haney López, the author of Dog Whistle Politics, said in an interview with Bill Moyers, “Over the 1980s, the Reagan tax cuts transferred a trillion dollars to America’s top one percent. Yes, voters got the tax cuts they thought were aimed at cutting off undeserving minorities, but, in fact, it was a politics that was showering money on the very richest Americans.”

Trashing the War on Poverty, President Reagan set about destroying the social compact that build the postwar American dream. Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh writes, “It’s difficult to overstate how much Reagan-era propaganda hurt the country. It distorted our understanding of how to help low-income people, as well as our optimism they could be helped, and it corroded the social contract that had prevailed since the New Deal.”

We now have a possible 2016 Republican nominee to thank for reminding America of the destructive mythology that forms the base of the Republican Party’s economic philosophy, and a reminder that President Carter wasn’t all that bad. Certainly not when compared against Republican presidents of the modern era.


link: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16620/rand_paul_risks_telling_the_truth_about_ronald_reagan

Been saying it for years a vote for Reagan was a vote for the destruction of the American middle class we to this day are feeling the effects of his poor policies even though one could make a strong argument for him not even knowing he was doing it...............

Admitting these things would bring the republicans to where I could take them serious as candidates. I've voted republican many times locally, because the guy I voted for was smart and represented us well without making claims about anything about either party. He only talked about the district and it's needs.

When I was very young I actually had to consider candidates from both parties.

Ya know...when i hear people talking about how great Reagan was, they always talk about his foreign policy.

never about his economics. So sometimes i'm left wondering this about some GOP:

is foreign policy more important than taking care of people in your own country?

because one thing Reagan did, that i never hear republicans complain about until Obama started doing the same thing was the amnesty for illegals.

that's a pretty liberal move for the greatest republican ever.

raise taxes? that's pretty liberal.

about the biggest republican thing he did was the war on drugs. and we all know how that's going now don't we...

I was always amazed when it was claimed he won the Cold War. It was like Gorbachev never existed.

You know, I liked him as a president. He represented America well. But in the end, his economic policies left us in a mess in the late 80's and early 90's. There is really no way to deny it. W did pretty much the same. In fact, W was worse. But here I sit having voted for Reagan twice and W twice. But mostly because I the alternatives weren't any better. I might have been wrong about that.

You know it amazes me how Reagen was able to talk the American public into marginalizing themselves in the political process. Since the time of Reagen there has been a steady decline of everything we ever stood for as a nation and as a people.

Our government is corporate owned and corporate owned right under our very eyes, ears, and noses. To the point that we hardly have a chance any more, and somehow we have been lead to believe and in many instances people still believe we have no choice. There was a time when Americans stood together for what was right and now we live in fear.

Roosevelt said it best we have nothing to fear but fear itself. I don't know how most Americans feel but I feel its time to kick corporations to the curb, there not people they do NOT have the same rights as any other American. What we have done here is we have legalized bribery and marginalized ourselves and our values.

We many of us spend our time complaining about welfare while ignoring the conditions that have been created that make welfare a necessity. We watch as our roads and bridges and schools crumble as corporations become richer and richer and we seem helpless and hopeless against it.

I wonder often how much long and how much more we are going to take.

I'm not sure I've ever agreed with you on anything before, but I certainly agree on this... Over the last 40 or so years, we've destroyed the middle class.

I don't know anything about whatever the corporate policies might have been back then but I do remember two things about those two era's. During Jimmy, everyone I knew in Lorain, Ohio and surrounding areas was broke.

During Reagan, not broke.

Every time you bring this up you only point at how the governments balance sheets looked, not the public.

No one can deny that once things got going under Reagan life was much better for those who went out and worked for it.

How about a little intellectual honesty and you admit that the left has done nothing to create genuine opportunity for those they claim to champion?

And I think this is the salient point. My dad brings this up too. As someone who was born in 84 I have no way to tell. I think it would be more fair to say that Reagan traded immediate success regardless of how it would impact the country a generation or two down the line.

Bottom line is if Reagan did as poorly when he was president as people sometimes say, he wouldn't have been as popular as he was. Didn't he win 84 in an electoral landslide?

Did you ever think that the country doesn't revolve around you or your experiences in Lorain County? Their was an entire country that had a completely opposite experience than you did during the Reagan era. You were lucky that you didn't have to experience what millions of Americans experienced. People talk about the "balance sheets" because they take information into context for the entirety of the country, not just Mr. Ted. Just because you experienced it differently doesn't make everyone else wrong.

If you want to talk about intellectual honesty, let's do so. But you're going to have to leave the bias at home and bring your thinking hat.

It's the same mindset as those that deny climate change/global warming because there's snow in their yard. The word is myopic.

My biggest problem with Reagan was that he first instituted no fault divorce in California, which started all kinds of moral issues in this country, and which began the disintegration of marriage in America.

Of course, no one cares about moral issues anymore .....

Let's talk about the morality of keeping people locked in a marriage where tons of abuse (verbal/physical) happens, and no good way to escape.

People care about moral issues, YTown. Just realize morals don't need to, or come from, a theological text with no factual backing.

Yea, that started in the 80s.. smh

I guess it all depends on what you think we stood for as a nation and as a people... before, during, and after Reagan..

Reagan made major changes to our economic policy and our tax structure and he gets blamed for everything bad.. Clinton came along and made some minor tweaks, the tech boom happened, and he's a genius... even though if Reagan had not come along first, Clinton would have had to make massive tax cuts to get to where he ended up...

People jump through hoops to make sure Reagan gets no credit for the end of the cold war.. but Clinton gets no blame for ignoring 4 or 5 terrorist attacks and doing nothing... which ultimately led to 9/11...

Clinton gets a ton of credit for his economic policy, much of which was authored by Allan Greenspan, who was hired first by Reagan near the end of his term....

People like to blame Reagan for the Citizens United SCOTUS case which treated corporations like people for political contributions.. the first case where it was determined that corporations deserved the same protections under the 14th amendment was in 1819.. and it was upheld many times after that. If you don't like it or if you want to change it, fine... but don't blame Reagan for it.

I just get frustrated because people act like we live in a static world with an on/off switch where everything resets when a new President takes office and that's absolutely not the case.

Or for that matter, those that believe so much in climate change/global warming that they'll ignore the proven falsified data that's been used to 'prove' global warming is caused by people.

I believe they still care about them a great deal. It's just that different people have different ideas about what's moral, about what a persons rights are and as such, what appears immoral to some doesn't seem immoral to others.

Or the people that deny the existence of climate change because it creates too much cognitive dissonance and instead of admitting that they are wrong or at least considering that they are likely wrong, they dig in deeper in their beliefs, - Link

No fault just means that 2 people can divorce for any reason, and that no cause needs to be brought before the court. In fact, no cause is allowed to be brought before the court.

Legal Dictionary | Law.com
http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1329

divorces (dissolutions) in which neither spouse is required to prove "fault" or marital misconduct on the part of the other. To obtain a divorce a spouse must merely assert incompatibility or irreconcilable differences, meaning the marriage has irretrievably broken down. This means there is no defense to a divorce petition (so a spouse cannot threaten to "fight" a divorce), there is no derogatory testimony, and marital misconduct cannot be used to achieve a division of property favorable to the "innocent" spouse.

So ... no matter what the offending spouse did to the "innocent" spouse, the innocent spouse can wind up getting screwed over twice ..... or more.

No fault divorce has contributed more to the breakdown of marriage, and the breakdown of the family, more than anything else I can think of. It has changed the perception of marriage from a lifelong commitment, one that 2 people should fight for with all they have to give, to a temporary arrangement, one that can easily be disposed of "when the love is gone", It has changed the perception of marriage into one that is completely unrealistic, one that says that all out passionate love is all that matters in a marriage, and that when that aspect dims with time, (and when a long term love and respect should develop) that it is time to get out.

Like so many other things today, there is no value in working hard for a marriage ..... not when getting out and trying again is so easy.

Yep .... cheating on one's spouse, broken families, financial irresponsibility, lying, stealing, drug use, premarital sex, abortion ..... so many things that were once considered immoral and now accepted as just part of a normal day.

I do acknowledge that things such as civil rights advances are positives, and help balance the scales to an extent ...... but man, we have gone so far downhill in so many ways that it is horrifying.

right, because that's never happened before in history....ever.

you're confusing people going behind closed doors about it as it never happening.

it's ALWAYS happened, but now people just don't care to hide it.

you're arguing semantics at this point.

So you consider smoking marijuana a moral issue?

I consider the growing feeling that all drugs should be legalized to be a moral issue. I believe that smoking marijuana is a microcosm for many other issues ..... where people say "we want to do this, so it should be our right to do so."

I come from a family where my parents divorced using such a label. My family didn't "breakdown".

My sister and I turned into successful individuals who give back to society with our professions, remain close to both sides of our parents, and and morally sound individuals.

but your God put it there.

my bad for using the tools he gives me to have fun.

I also came from a broken family. Sometimes children succeed no matter their upbringing. Unfortunately, most children are harmed by being in a one parent home, and in growing up in broken homes.

The exceptions prove the rule.

Children succeed based on their parents and the resources around them. Children also "fail" out of traditional households, too.

This is more nuanced than "divorce is evil!". It's also way off-topic from Reagan being a charlatan that hoodwinked America, too.

people talk about reagan like they want to make him the president again, even though he's dead.

sort of like North Korea.

Of course they do. However, the simple truth is that a child has a much better chance of success in life when they are raised in a 2 parent home, with their parents to guide them through their development.

Unless, of course, you want to argue that children in broken homes, and single parent homes, are somehow better off, and become more successful than those being raised by both parents in a 2 parent home?

Oh, and this is on topic in that it is the one major area with which I most disagreed with Reagan.

That's simply NOT true whats worse we have watched as our wages have stayed virtually the same since Reagen was president that alone should set off alarm bells. Do some research thats right while corporate American and the rich 1% have seen their incomes go up to the tune of 300% we the working class have watched our wages remain the SAME.

Couple that with the fact that corporations have for decades now raked in record profits and you see the results of his policies. I won't say his policies failed they did work if your rich or if your a corporation you are one happy dude. Its the rest of us who are still waiting for the trickle down to kick in that feel left out. Unfortunately that is most of us.

The most rich people ever created in our history were created under Obama.

not to make this about military but...

i don't like reagan.

he armed the rebels in afghanistan in the 80's....

and guess who got attacked with those weapons? **raises hand**.

I thought it was Charlie Wilson that armed Afghanistan's mujahideen?

He was the creator of Osama Bin Ladin and armed him that is true, but like Issis was George's creation Reagen started the decline we see to this day in the middle east.

Reagen once said the only thing wrong with liberals is they believe so much that isn't true, But the real lie was him. To this day he is held up like a cult hero and he is easily the single worst president in my life time. There is hardly a part of our lives today he didn't nearly completely ruin.

I challenge everyone lover or hater to study his work as our president. Be prepared to be disappointed.

the congressman was only the architect. it was reagan who expanded it.

I certainly can. The Reagan and Clinton administrations were arguably the worst thing to happen to the U.S. blue collar laborer in modern American history. You can make arguments as to what extent was within their control or not, but they both oversaw the destruction of the American middle class as we know it. And as others have said, I'm not quite sure why he's hailed as a bastion of conservatism. Like him or hate him, he was a fairly centrist president.

The two largest drops in the earning power of production and non supervisory folks (the old traditional middle class) occurred during the Presidencies of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. The wages literally fell off the table after peaking earlier in Nixon's presidency. They continued to slide under Reagan and Bush, came back some under Clinton and have moved almost laterally but with a slight upward trend during Bush II and Obama bouncing up and down with the recessions. So if you want to figure out how/why wages collapsed, I would recommend you go back into the early to mid 1970s to start your research... well before Reagan was the President.

Also, the actual average hourly wage rate has followed a similar trajectory but not nearly as severe, what has changed during that time is the the average person used to work 39 hours per week but it's now about 33 hours per week.. so total earnings is much less even though the hourly rate is greater.


People should stop throwing around the mantra of the 1%. The median income of the top 1% is a little over $700K a year. The median income of the top .1% is about $27 million a year... This trend also started back in the 70s.. well before Reagan.

So I'm not going to defend Reagan as the best thing ever or a President without flaws but just as some conservatives have put him on a pedestal as the President who could do no wrong... the left has made him the poster child for all that is wrong with our country, which is equally untrue.

So what you're saying is that one of the most blue collar areas in the country was the shining example of prosperity the rest of the country longed for?

Stupid.

If people weren't buying the cars produced in Lorain and Avon Lake with the steel produced at the US Steel plant (I think, don't know where Ford got their steel) then why were they working so much?

Are you also saying that the double digit mortgage rates and inflation only disappeared in Lorain County and not the rest of the country?

Also, stupid.

My stepfather was laid off several times during the Jimmy years, one time for 6 weeks. I asked him why, he said 'cause people aren't buying'.

I asked the guy I learned how to paint from how things were during the Jimmy years, he said he had to live in a warehouse with his wife for a year because that's all he could afford (here in Central Ohio).
He also said he couldn't paint anything for free at times during Jimmy's ineptitude.
I asked if things changed during the Reagan years, yes they did. Exactly how fast we didn't get into, but it wasn't too long after the switch that things started to improve.
Being in the residential trades is helpful, if you know what you're doing.