Things Reagan Did

The revisionism of history that is going on with respect to Ronald Reagan is a disservice to both the populace at large and the man himself. The unveiling of a statue of Reagan at the capital was yet another chance for people like Sean Hannity and others on the right to peddle their misinformation about President Reagan and his policies.

I lived through his administrations and voted for him in my first Presidential election. I remember his tenure well. Hannity has talked about President Obama's need to "follow the Reagan model" as if it were a flawless plan for a presidency (it isn't). Take, for example, a very basic fact: Reagan would not have understood the venom conservative pundits display in regard to immigration. But first......

Don't get me wrong--President Reagan deserves credit for many things. Chief among them is giving the country back a sense of confidence that it lost starting with the scandals of the Nixon administration. Another major positive is that human rights, prior to his tenure, was seen as a liberal issue. His effort in this area, though rife with hypocrisy at the time, turned this from a partisan issue into a nearly-universal bi-partisan issue. His oratory skills were simply amazing. His speech to the nation after the Challenger disaster is something every citizen should strive to hear (and to read the story behind its creation).

However, Reagan wasn't responsible for many things that these mis-informers put forth at every opportunity. Reagan grew up in a time when immigration was considered a hallmark of American values. In one of the only examples where he even commented on it he told an audience of naturalizing immigrants that immigrants "enlivened the national life with new ideas and new blood," and "enrich us" with "a delightful diversity." This is also a President who signed a bill giving amnesty to 2.7 million illegal aliens. Can you imagine Fox News standing behind those viewpoints today?

Another example is the right's continued mantra in condemning Obama's comments regarding meeting leaders of enemy states without pre-conditions. The Reagan model would dictate exactly this course. If Reagan had insisted on pre-conditions for meeting we'd have never gotten anywhere with the Soviet Union. It was a nod to his intelligence that he didn't insist on such lunacy. Reagan reached out, openly, and without pre-conditions (and to the complete shock and disgust of most of his own party leadership) to Leonid Brezhnev just after taking office in 1981. This didn't go anywhere because Brezhnev was on his deathbed at this point. He then did the same thing with both Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko (both succeeded Brezhnev but died not long after assuming power). It was no surprise that he did exactly the same thing when Mikhail Gorbachev took control. He sent a personal letter to Gorbachev that was hand-delivered by then Vice President George H. W. Bush. The letter included an open invitation to a summit. If Obama acted this way with Iran the right would go ballistic.

Some other tidbits that Americans who didn't live through the Reagan years should know about "the Reagan model" as it existed, not as it is being re-envisioned:

• Reagan almost single-handedly saved Social Security by making a deal with then Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill to keep benefit levels the same and to raise payroll taxes which guaranteed the entitlement for decades to come. What's more is that in mid-1981 we were being bombarded with warnings that there was virtually no way to avoid the system going bankrupt. Today the vitriol is much worse over the potential of it going broke in 2037. (source)
• One of the most religious Presidents of our time did virtually nothing to put down abortion. In fact, history shows, like many Presidents, he simply told abortion foes what they wanted to hear and then did nothing about it once in office. In the final accounting two out of his three Supreme Court appointments voted to uphold Roe v. Wade. (source)
• He asked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to produce a report showing the believed long-term physical and emotional trauma women suffered as a result of having an abortion. Pro-Life Koop couldn't find any scientific data to support this supposition and refused to produce the final version of a draft report. (source)
• The Federal Government expanded greatly during his administration. The number of workers in the government rose by 61,000. Under President Clinton, for example, the number fell by 373,000. The Department of Veterans Affairs, one of the largest federal agencies, was his creation. (source)
• He more than tripled the national debt. (source)
• He compromised on arms controls with the Soviets and, at one point, came within a whisker of agreeing with Gorbachev to scrapping all of boths sides nuclear arsenals (Reagan had a strong belief that nuclear weapons should be abolished). The only thing that kept this from happening was Reagan's hard-headed refusal to drop "Star Wars" (his ill-fated missile defensive initiative). (source)
• Reagan condemned an Israeli preventive strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.
• Yes, he cut taxes heavily at the beginning of his first term. What isn't often brought up is that he then raised taxes after that (in 1982, 1983, 1984 & 1986) in a bid to make up for the record deficits he created and the negative impact it had on the nation. This is, by the way, a positive mark on his tenure. Seeing that the estimates of 1981 were way off the mark he altered his plans.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 950.68 when he took office. A year later, after his massive tax cuts, the Dow was at 845.89 (down 12%). He started raising taxes and, as he continued, the Dow climbed to over 2,200. Does this sound at all the way Sean Hannity describes the Reagan plan? He tells listeners that Reagan cut everyone's taxes and the greatest era of American prosperity resulted. Uh huh. Tax cuts had nothing to do with it. An August 1983 Congressional Budget Office report stated, "Lower interest rates after mid-1982 permitted the recovery to begin."
• Unemployment rose steadily during his first term and saw a peak of 10.8% during 1982-83 which is the highest it has been since. It was 7.2% when he took over. It didn't get back to that number until June of 1984 (It bounced around after that until July of 1986 when it finally stayed below 7.2% for the duration). (source)
• Mortgage rates were lousy under Reagan. The best you could do during all 8 years he was in office, for a 30-year mortgage, was 9.11%. For much of his term the rate was in the 13% range. Can you imagine the outcry today if that was the best you could do?
• We had a Secretary of the Interior, James Watt who was openly hostile about the environment. When speaking about his poor record on the environment before Congress he stated, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." If you think that's bad then how about this from one of his speeches regarding his staff: "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent." That finally got him fired.
• He had one of the worst heads of the Environmental Protection Agency in its history in a woman named Anne Burford. Republicans and Democrats alike accused her of being against the very organization she headed as she set out to dismantle it the moment she started in the post. She often boasted that she'd cut the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half-inch. She had to resign in disgrace (with 20 of her top employees) in 1983 due to "conflicts of interest" involving the Superfund (environmental cleanup) program. She gave money from the fund to Republican Congressional candidates for 1982. When she wrote her own book she said that she was following direct orders from Reagan and fired when the investigation began to focus on his role. Adding credibility to this claim is that Reagan attempted, a year later, to appoint her to the chairmanship of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and the Atmosphere. The Republican-controlled Senate forced him to withdraw her nomination.
• We should have seen these two disastrous appointments coming. In 1980 while campaigning for the Presidency he claimed that trees were the major cause of air pollution. (source)
• In a bid to cut school lunch program budgets the administration attempted to have ketchup and relish reclassified from condiments to vegetables so that the mandate to serve vegetables could be met with these items instead. The attempt failed after a major public outcry. Believe it or not this actually was based on some sound reasoning (kids wouldn't eat the vegetables anyway costing millions of dollars in waste) but the presentation and defense of it was so bad that it couldn't recover. (source)
• More government officials (appointed by Reagan) were indicted and convicted (over 100) than under any other President. To this day I have a hard time thinking of any period during his tenure when indictments weren't dominating the news.
• Reagan gave Saddam WMD's. In 2002 conservative Robert Novak wrote: "An eight-year-old Senate report confirms that disease-producing and poisonous materials were exported, under U.S. government license, to Iraq from 1985 to 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war."
• Reagan totally ignored, at its most critical period, the outbreak of AIDS. Remember, the first cases came to light in 1981. Reagan's own Communications Director, Pat Buchanan (yes, that Pat Buchanan) said that AIDS is "nature's revenge on gay men." Reagan only mentioned AIDS in mid-1987. By that time 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed and 20,849 had died. The disease had reached 113 countries counting more than 50,000 cases. Imagine the hate and ignorance that leads people to believe that a virus is only transmitted between gay men.
• Wall Street collapsed in 1987 dropping 1,000 points (remember it was only at 2,700 at the time), a huge 37% drop.
• His tenure left successor George H.W. Bush with an economy so impacted that he faced two recessions and a deficit so crushing that Bush had to go back on his own famous promise, "Read my lips. No new taxes." The reversal cost Bush the Presidency but also helped to right the economy after he left.
• His out-of-the-gate policies were so "popular" and "successful" at the time that Republicans lost 26 seats in the 1982 Congressional election (even with the help of Anne Burford). (source)
• In January, 1981, Reagan claimed the federal budget was "out of control". At the time the deficit was almost $74 billion while the federal debt reached $930 billion. By 1983 the deficit reached $208 billion. When he left office the national debt reached $2.6 trillion.
• In his eight years in office the United States moved from being the world's largest international creditor to become its largest debtor nation.
• Reagan removed restrictions that prevented mortgage companies from lending to homeowners without them putting down a significant amount first. This led directly to the subprime mortgage fiasco.
• Reagan deregulated the financial sector allowing them free reign to gamble with our money. This allowed the savings and loan scandal of the late 80's, the hedge fund troubles and today's financial meltdown as only these changes allowed for the creation of credit default swaps, etc.

And this is hardly a comprehensive list of the things Reagan did that fly in the face of the rhetoric being put forth on Fox News these days. I didn't even go into Iran-Contra--his biggest scandal. Remember also the next time Sean Hannity goes on about Reagan and his "greatest era of prosperity" this Wall Street Journal report on job creation. It says that Reagan created 16 million jobs (not 21 million as Hannity purports) while President Clinton created 23.1 million. George W. Bush? 3 million. Hannity punching bag, Jimmy Carter, created 10.5 million.

One of the biggest canards is Reagan's trickle down economics (which he borrowed from 1920's Republicans, and we know how that worked out), also known as supply-side economics or Reaganomics. His own budget director stated that it was nothing but rhetoric and "was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate." There is no evidence anywhere to show that giving the rich more tax breaks results in a better economy for all.

(A note about sources used in this entry: I have provided links for sources where possible but those source links are anything but exhaustive. For simplicity sake I have included only a single source for readability purposes. Virtually all of the entries start from my direct memory and were checked across several sources. A few of my recollections weren't accurate and were not included here.)