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Don't forget the war on drugs
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.
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.
I recall seeing that exposé Geraldo Rivera did on Staten Island's Willowbrook State School. Wild.
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.
hmmmm...why does this story sound so familiar?
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.
Good old trickle down economics at work!
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).
"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
Another great president on the right, this time a fucking actor... A DAMN ACTOR!
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
many of them are dinos, shills for the gop anyways, wouldnt have gotten anything done anyways.
~~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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
It took many years before people found effective antivirals to help people infected with AIDS. No nation had effective treatment.
Having to work to develop treatment is one thing. Actively ignoring the existence of HIV/AIDS and just letting people die is an entirely different thing. Reagan was a piece of shit.
It's not like the medical industrial complex sits around waiting for the whitehouse to tell them which diseases to work on. They know how to make a dollar, they just didn't have the knowledge at the time.
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.
They also were smuggling Crack into the states to fund the contras (who are terrorists)
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
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.
Don't forget his campaign for governor led to the massive student loan issues we have today. College was just starting to be accessible to everyone that wasn't a white man, and they just couldn't have that!
The 13th amendment created the legal groundwork for transforming a free people into a nation of de facto chattel slaves. Reagan accelerated this process massively.
Mental patients 🖐️ (눈‸눈)
"Prisoners with jobs" 👈 (♡ω♡ )
In (very) broad strokes, the US basic current modern collapse timeline is like: Nixon --> Regan --> Fairness Doctrine --> Glass-Steagall --> Patriot Act --> bank bailout --> tea party to maga --> current fubar lyfe
goddamn fucking reagan
Need to squeeze Citizens United in there
And don't forget ending the fairness doctrine, one of the contributions to the polarization of US politics.
The homelessness crisis is not about mental health, it is about housing affordability. This also plays into societal biases against the mentally ill.
Yes, however there are many people who are homeless because they are unable to "properly" function in society due to untreated mental illnesses, part of Reagan's budget cuts reduced public health funding, shuttering public mental health facilities. Granted, some had horrendous conditions which has a lasting reputation for "Insane asylums".