"I love listening to these guys lecture us about deficits. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit." - BO, still blaming Bush in 2012
I just recently finished Peggy Noonan's "When Character was King," a book about Ronald Reagan as a leader and as a person. I've always admired Ronald Reagan - he's always been my favorite president. Now more than ever, I'm bitter that I missed out on his term (I was born when Clinton was in office, I remember sitting on the floor in my living room coloring or something while my parents watched George W. Bush be elected, and now...ugh.)
There were so many things that stood out to me in this book, but probably the biggest is just how far the leadership of this country has fallen since the Reagan era and how sad it is that all the work he did is seemingly being undone under the BO administration. The contrast between Ronald Reagan and BO is mind-blowing.
Before I really knew anything about Reagan, I knew that he helped the economy and that he was strong in foreign relations. Anyone who knows anything about BO knows that he's helped decimate the economy and that he's a joke in foreign relations. Comparing these two presidents policies in these areas reveals a great deal about them
The Economy
BO has often claimed that he inherited the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. That's not true. Like BO, Reagan inherited a very weak economy from his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. His crisis was arguably worse - the Misery Index, inflation rate plus the unemployment rate, was 19.5 when Reagan took office compared to 7.5 when BO began his first term. Today it's at 9.5. Unlike BO, Reagan didn't spend his entire presidency blaming someone else for his economic troubles. He fixed it.
Unemployment and the Work Force
When Reagan took office, unemployment was at 7.4%. When he left in 1989, he had cut that by more than thirty percent, to 5.4% What's even better, though, is he did it by creating jobs. The Labor Force Participation rate (LFP), which measures the proportion of the population either looking for jobs or working, was at 63.5% when Reagan took office. By the end of his first term, when he was running for reelection, he had it up to 64.4% - an addition of 5.7 million jobs.
In contrast, when BO took office, unemployment was at 7.8%. At the end of December 2012, it was at....7.8%. This number is incredibly deceiving, though, because it's based solely on people who are in the LFP and looking for jobs. When BO took office, the LFP was around 66%. In December 2012, it was at 63.7%. As of January 20, 88,839,000 Americans ages 16 and older are not looking for work.
To sum up, while Reagan cut unemployment by more than 30% while adding 5.7 million jobs in his first term (and that's just his first term), BO has seemingly done nothing about unemployment while decreasing the work force.
Inflation
For people, like me, who struggle to understand economics, inflation is "a rise in general prices in an economy over an extended period of time." Think gas prices.
In the last year of Jimmy Carter's term, inflation had reached as high as 14.8%. The day Reagan came into the White House, it was at 12.8%. By 1983, less than two years into his term, Reagan had brought inflation down to below 4%, where it remained for the remainder of his presidency. He did this by "backing a tighter monetary supply" - not printing more money. This led to an initial recession, where unemployment reached as high as 10.2%, before providing a stable economy as described above.
Here's BO's inflation resume: When BO took office, inflation was at 0.2%. As of January, it was at 1.6%. Yep, that increased too. According to DollarTimes.com, where you can find out the value of American dollars every year compared to today (try it - it's fun), $1.00 in 1984, at the end of Reagan's first term, had the same buying power as $2.27 in 2013.
Let's use gas prices as a specific example. Under Reagan's first term, the price of gas decreased from $1.25 to $1.17. In BO's first term, gas prices rose from $2.40 to $3.17.
Taxes
In his first few months in office, Reagan enacted the Economy Recovery Tax Act of 1981, where he cut taxes across the board by 23% - including for the highest income earners. Reagan was a believer in trickle-down economics, meaning that the benefits of economic policies that benefit the wealthy in turn help everyone as the wealthy employ and invest. He cut the budgets of the Departments of Housing and Urban Development by 40%, of Commerce by 32%, of Agriculture by 24%, of Education by 19%, and of Transportation by 18%; he did increase spending in the Department of Defense because he was a firm believer in the importance of our national security (we'll get to that). Because of these policies, every income level saw an income increase, the highest tax rate on individuals went from 78% to 35%, and the country maintained an unprecedented 92 month economic boom.
Through the fiscal cliff bill, BO raised taxes on everyone making more than $450,000, although he originally wanted to tax everyone making more than $250,000. Through that same bill, he agreed to $1 of cuts to federal programs for every $41 spent. Through the current sequestration, he's trying to raise them again. If they're not raised under the sequestration, the Department of Defense will suffer budget cuts.
Foreign Relations
Ronald Reagan was a badass. That is all.
A little backstory on that speech makes it all the more kick ass. Reagan was an adamant anti-Communist - he viewed it as the biggest threat to American security ("How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone he reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.") He'd had been trying to get the Soviets to cut back on the number of nuclear weapons for his entire presidency. Not surprisingly, they resisted.
In 1979, Reagan visited NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). While there, he asked what would happen if the Soviets launched a nuclear missile at the US at that moment. The response was: "It would blow us away." Reagan was disturbed to know that, for all the money that was spent there, all NORAD would be able to do in the face of a real nuclear threat was tell the American people that they had approximately fifteen minutes to live.
At the time, most people thought they were pretty safe because of MAD - mutually assured destruction, that is, if the Soviets fired at the US the US would retaliate and vice versa, ergo no one fired. But Reagan didn't like that, especially when he was told that even under that policy approximately 150 million Americans would die if a nuclear war actually commenced. So he launched what he called the SDI - the Strategic Defense Initiative.
The SDI was a program to form a sort of nuclear shield to protect from a nuclear missile. It wasn't supported by American citizens - it was impossible, it wasn't necessary, it was too expensive, it would be destabilizing, it was only a bargaining chip for Reagan to get the Soviets to cut their number of nuclear weapons - and it wasn't supported in the Pentagon - because they knew it meant less funding for their projects. And it definitely wasn't supported in the Soviet Union.
The Soviets knew they were fighting a losing battle, that their totalitarian dictatorship wouldn't spread across the world. The one thing they had going for them was their ability to scare other nations with their nuclear missiles. If Reagan succeeded with SDI and gave it to other nations, as he promised to do, they lost all that remained of their power. They also knew that SDI might work and they did not want the US to beat them.
Gorbachev was the fourth Soviet president during Reagan's tenure and all his predecessors had refused to come to terms with Reagan regarding arms reductions of both countries. In 1985, Reagan gave it another go with this new president in Geneva. SDI was a major topic and, for Gorbachev, a major problem. He did not believe that Reagan would share it with the Soviets and believed it was an offense because why would the US need a shield if they didn't intend to issue the preeminent strike?
The two men got along and left the meeting without coming to terms, but they continued their discussion through a series of letters. Reagan used them to soothe away Gorbachev's concerns regarding SDI. Gorbachev responded without a public letter where he promised that "the Soviet Union would eliminate all its intermediate force nuclear weapons in Europe, would agree to a moratorium on nuclear testing and it would consider the elimination of all nuclear weapons on both sides by the end of the century...in return for one thing." This one thing, of course, was the elimination of SDI.
Reagan had a lot to gain by agreeing, publicity wise. He didn't. The Soviets, he knew, were working on building their own version of SDI and he still thought it was too important to surrender. What followed then was a series of hostage situations and tensions had risen high by the time the two men met again in Reykjavik.
In Reykjavik, Gorbachev and Reagan made immense progress. Gorbachev agreed to eliminate nuclear missiles in Europe and all ballistics missiles within ten years. They both agreed to cut nuclear delivery programs. Gorbachev said he would "seriously reduce the Warsaw Pact forces." They'd come to terms and had negotiated, in Reagan's words, "the most massive weapons reductions cut in history." Then Gorbachev said that it all depended, of course, on the end of SDI.
Reagan lost his temper. Gorbachev refused to budge. Reagan left the meeting.
Again, Reagan took a huge risk, publicity wise. This would have been "the most massive weapons reductions cut in history." He would have had respect from his supports and critics. It might have been the most defining moment of his entire presidency. Except it wasn't.
This was. The next year, he gave his famous "Tear down that wall!" speech. Four months later, Gorbachev requested another meeting. In that meeting, the came to an agreement banning all intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Reagan continued work on SDI and the Soviet Union became a non-threat.
Yeah. He was a badass.
Barack Obama is an apologist. That is all.
- Four Americans were killed in Benghazi in a terrorist attack. BO blamed an anti-Muslim video made in the US and apologized.
- This, of course, was a terrorist attack. That nobody was ever punished for.
- Hell, here are his top 10 apologies as of 2009.
- He's hired Chuck Hagel as his Secretary of Defense. Chuck Hagel hates Israel.
- BO refuses to make any spending cuts....except for the Department of Defense.
- BO's Soviet Union is North Korea. They have nuclear weapons. They just did a test of said nuclear weapons. North Korea just released a video game of BO in flames. BO has done nothing.
I don't really need to sum up the differences between these two men here. The data and the policies speak for themselves. Here's a visual difference, though: Ronald Reagan, having just lost the presidential bid in 1976 to incumbent President Gerald Ford, was asked to make an impromptu speech. This wasn't hard, because he was intelligent, passionate, and knew what he was talking about. Have you ever seen BO without his TelePrompter?
God bless America
