I'll give him that. I thought a lot of his policies were negative for America, but I always felt like he wanted the best for Americans, misguided as he was.
Ronald Reagan restored faith in America
"Ronald Reagan loved the United States with a deep passion and without apology. He believed in the American dream because he had lived it. He was a man of great common sense and much smarter than most presidential observers would give him credit for. He had a near-photographic memory, and was a good student of the complex issues a president must learn. "
by Ed Rollins, CNN Senior Political Contributor
I'll give him that. I thought a lot of his policies were negative for America, but I always felt like he wanted the best for Americans, misguided as he was.
nice counter balance...it seems that most reagan threads on this board are negative threads about reagan
The more I learn about Reagan, the less I like him. But I'm not going to spoil your thread. Just one thing. Please try to see through globalist propaganda
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
yeah right. She fucking worked for Reagan. The myth of our governemnt working on the people's behalf is the propaganda
Maybe you form these interpretations of what you read through your tinfoil filters? Am I supposed to consider it valid? We elect our government, it represents The People, so you are making a mythical claim... that the idea of The People working on behalf of The People, is Propaganda. Don't you find that a bit foolish and silly?
The economic recovery had nothing to do with Reagan and everything to do with Paul Volcker who was appointed by Carter. He is credited with finally getting rid of stagflation which had plagued the US since the mid 60s. I find amazing that this myth has been sustained down the years when the facts are easily accessible to all who care to find them.
Stagflation happened to reach its peak on Carter's watch, spurred on by the 1979 oil shock. How Carter can be blamed for a trend that began a decade and a half earlier is a mystery -- and a testimony as to how presidential candidates often exploit the public's economic ignorance for their own political gain.
However, Carter did in fact take a tremendously important step in ending stagflation. He nominated Paul Volcker for the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker was committed to eradicating stagflation by giving the nation some bitter medicine: an intentional recession. In 1980, Volcker tightened the money supply, which stopped job growth in the economy. In response to hard times, businesses began cutting their prices, and workers their wage demands, to stay in business. Volcker argued that eventually this would wring inflationary expectations out of the system.
The recovery of 1981 was unintentional, and with inflation still high, Volcker tightened the money supply even more severely in 1982. This resulted in the worst recession since the Great Depression. Unemployment in the final quarter of 1982 soared to over 10 percent, and Volcker was accused of the "cold-blooded murder of millions of jobs." Even high-ranking members of Reagan's staff were vehemently opposed to his actions. Congress actually considered bringing the independent Fed under the government's direct control, to avoid such economic pain in the future. Today, economists calculate that the cost of Volcker's anti-inflation medicine was $1 trillion -- an astounding sum. But Wall Street demanded that Volcker stay the course, and that may have been the only thing that saved him.
In the late summer of 1982, inflation looked defeated, so Volcker sharply expanded the money supply. Once as high as 14 percent in 1981, the Fed's discount rate fell from 11 to 8.5 percent between August and December 1982. Within months, the economy roared to life, and took off on an expansion that would last seven years. Because the recession had been so deep, and the number of available workers so large (with not only laid-off workers waiting to return to work, but also a record number of women seeking to join the workforce), the recovery was guaranteed to be long and healthy.
Interestingly, Volcker was transformed from villain to hero after the victory over inflation. His reputation and integrity were so unquestioned that when his term as Chairman came up for renewal, Reagan renominated him with overwhelming popular approval. Another interesting tidbit is that although Volcker's intentional recession was a classically Keynesian approach to combating inflation, he did so under the name of "monetarism". (The policies recommended by the two theories converged at this point.) Milton Friedman, the creator of monetarist theory, and other conservatives were pleased that the Fed had finally converted to monetarism. However, they were outraged in late 1982 when Volcker threw off the cloak of monetarism and openly returned to Keynesian policies for expanding the economy. Most economists now accept that the Fed was not monetarist at all during this period, and that the label was merely political cover for drastic but necessary action.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-carterreagan.htm
Last edited by cancel2 2022; 02-03-2011 at 04:29 AM.
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