RONALD REAGAN IN RETROSPECT

I never was caught up by the Ronald Reagan mystique and feel it strange that so many conservatives were. In fact, I felt in the 1970s, that Ronald Reagan was already in early Alzheimer's disease because he would so often shoot himself in the foot when answering questions (and Reagan's son Ron says Ronald Reagan had Alzheimers when in his presidency).

Reagan may be known as small government advocate, but he left the presidency with a larger budget and with more Federal employees than he found it, largely through a major increase in the military budget. In fact, Reagan was the only president between Johnson and Obama not to either have flat Federal employment or to decrease Federal employment. Bush-43's record was of a flat Federal employment record, Nixon, Ford and Carter decreased Federal employment by a bit each, but Bush-41 and Clinton decreased Federal employment by over a million (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy10/pdf/hist.pdf) with Clinton accounting for about two-thirds of the decrease.


After a large tax cut for the wealthy in his first year that blew a hole in the Federal budget, he raised taxes 11 times in the rest of his tenure recouping about half the lost revenue from the tax cut. These included closing various "loop-holes." In fact, I ended up paying higher taxes because of these closings. Reagan never came close to balancing the Federal budget (Even the big spender Lyndon Johnson had a positive cash flow in his final year.).


Reagan was certainly an avowed anti-communist and had even been an informant to the FBI concerning "pinko" Hollywood people. After being an avowed proponent of building nuclear armaments, he evolved to become interested in decreasing the threat of nuclear war through agreements such as the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) and the Start Treaty. During detente I was in Moscow and Leningrad for a 10 day period, and I came away feeling that the Soviet Union was in deep economic trouble. There were street lights, for example, but I never saw them turned on. Reagan entered an arms race supposedly to hasten the decline of the Soviet Union, but it almost bankrupted us too. I feared we were going to become a "banana republic" because of his wild spending. Perhaps the most frivolous spending program was Star Wars (Developing methods to shoot down nuclear war heads). But we should remember that the Berlin Wall came down during Bush-41's tenure, not Reagan's, and the Start Treaty was signed by Bush-41 although it was started by Reagan.


Perhaps the most important thing Reagan did was break the Air Traffic Controllers Union. It was scary to have our commercial planes flying with unexperienced controllers, but someone must have told the administration that the job was not all that difficult because I don't recall any airline mishaps during that period. The importance was, however, to give backbone to industry to oppose their unions, which they did.

One of the worst things Ronald Reagan did was sign the deregulation of the Savings and Loan industry. They went wild with their new found freedom and created a major economic crisis that spread to many banks as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis) which was finally eliminated by Bush-41. Among the outcomes of this was the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandel which cut short the political careers of three Senators and rebukes for poor judgement to two others.


The thing that troubled me most about Ronald Reagan was his views of the poor, and that they shouldn't be empowered. He felt the homeless were homeless by choice. He didn't seem to believe that there were hungry people in America besides those who were dieting, and he wanted to get rid of Social Security. For someone who revered the Bible, I don't see how it is possible to not want to help the poor as that was what Jesus was all about. And the Reagans benefited from Federal Aid during the Great Depression. When his father lost his job as a shoe salesman, he joined the WPA (Works Progress Administration). For one criticism of Ronald Reagan, try: http://hnn.us/articles/5544.html. But Reagan's attitudes about the poor didn't hurt him with many members of his own political party as many "self made" men (and women too?) feel that "I did it and so can they."


Though Reagan was typed as a "warmonger" by the opposition, the only war he got us involved in was to overthrow a Communist government in the island of Granada under the guise of rescuing American medical students. At least he picked a country we could beat. But perhaps his controversial "cutting and running" after the car bombing of the U.S. Embassy (63 killed) in April and the Marine base disaster (241 killed) in Lebanon in October of 1983, rather than going to war against the terrorists emboldened them and led to worse problems with them in the future. But Reagan did support wars indirectly such as the famous Iran Contra affair and in Afghanistan.


So there was much to forgive by those who were caught up in the Reagan mystique. He increased the size of the Federal Government, he never balanced the Federal budget, he started the Start treaty to control nuclear proliferation which seems to be opposed by many Republicans, and he "cut and ran" from terrorists. So why is Ronald Reagan so revered by Republicans? I believe Richard Darman was correct that it is a spiritual thing, not factual (Whose In Control? Polar Politics and The Sensible Center, 1996).